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BEYOND LIFE

BOOKS BY MR. CABELL

Euay$i

BEYOND LIFE

NoveUi

T HM CBEAM OP THE JEST

THE 80T7L OF MELICENT

THE RIVET IN GBANDPATHEB'S NECK

THE OOBDS OF VANITY

THE EAGLE'S SHADOW

Tales:

THE GEBTAIN HOUB

CHIVALBY

THE LINE OF LOVE

GALLANTEY

Venesi

FBOM THE HIDDEN WAY

C^enealogieMi

BBANCH OF ABINGDON

BBANCHIANA

THE MAJOBS AND THEIB MABBIAGE8

BEYOND
LIFE

Dizain des Demiurges

JAMES BRANCH CABELL

*'tMany a man Uves a burden to Ae earth
hut a good book is the precious life-blood of a
master-spirii, embalmed and ireasurtd up onpm^
pose to a l^ beyond life."

NEW YORK

KoBEKT M. McBride Gf Company
1919

Copyrisht 1919

ROBERT M. McBRIDE Qf OOMPAWY

PmteJ m the Umud Stmts oj AmencM.

Published January, 1919.

GUY HOLT

Ctemility again begets
Uneoiueioiiable draadfol debts. . .

Yon thai have piped to-day mnst danee;
Herein beholding maintenance
Of argmnents about Bomanee
(Like fountains falling whence they spring)
To yon revert its eddying.

Contents

I Wherein We Approach All Authors

AT Their Best 3

II Which Deals With the Demiurge . 23

III Which Hints at the Witch- Woman . 55

IV Which Admires the Economist . 85
V Which Considers the Reactionary . 127

VI Which Values the Candle . . 163

VII Which Indicates the Mountebank . 203

VIII Which Concerns the Contemporary . 243

IX Which Defers to the Arbiters . . vjj

X Wherein We Await the Dawn . 323

WB APPBOAOH

— So I propose to aeitle the matter, once for alL In
fact I feel mTself in ratilier good form and about to
shine to perhaps exceptional advantage. . .

—Hark to the fellowl . . Bat riddle me this,
noW| in lihe name of CEdipusI who wants to hear about
your moonstruck theories t

— Such, CurJIj-Locks, is not the game I quest. . . I
propose to lecture to bare benches; granted Indeed, it
would be base to deceive you. But is it not apparent
— even, as one might say uncivilly, to you— that the
lack of an audience breeds edifying candor in the
speakerf and leads him presently to overhear a discovery
of his aetoal opinion?

Wherein We Approach All
Authors at Their Best.

WHI4NEVEB I am in Fairhaven, if but
in thonghty I desire the company of
John Charteris. His morals I am not
called upon to defend, nor do I esteem myself
really responsible therefor: and from his no-
tions I frequently get entertainment . . .

Besides, to visit Charteris realizes for yon
the art of retaining ^'an atmosphere," because
Willoughby Hall, to the last muUion and gable,
is 80 precisely the mansion which one would
accredit in imagination to the author of In Old
Lichfield, and AshtaroWs Lackey, and all those
other stories of the gracious Southern life of
more stately years. . . But pictures of this
eighteenth century manor-house have been so
often reproduced in literary supplements and
maga2sines that to describe Willoughby Hall
appears superfluous.

Fairhaven itself, I find, has in the matter of
"atmosphere" deteriorated rather appallingly
since the town's northern outskirt was disfig-

BEYOND LIFE

nred by a powder mill. Unfamiliar persons, in
new-looking dothes, now walk on Cambridge
Street, with an nnseemly effect of aotoal haste
to readh their destination; and thus pass un-
abashed by St Martin's Churchyard, wherein
they have not any great-grandparents. Imme-
diately across the street from the dmrchyard
now glitters the Colonial Moving Picture Pal-
ace: and most of the delectable old-fashioned
aborigines '^take boarders" (at unbelievable
rates), and time-honored King's College rents
out its dormitories in summer months to the
munition workers. Then, too, everybody has
money. . . In fine, there remains for the future
historian who would perfectly indicate how in-
credible were the dianges wrought by recent
years, merely to make the statement that Fair-
haven was synchronized For without any inter-
mediary gradations the town has passed from
the eighteenth to the twentieth century.

But Willoughby Hall had remained un-
changed since my last visit, save for the instal-
lation of electric lights. Ckarteris I think it
must have been who attended to it that these
were so discreetly placed and shaded that no-

WE APPROACH

where do yon actually see an anachronistic
hnlh; for the wizened little fellow attaches far
more importance to snch details tl^an does his
wife: and on each of his mantles yon may still
find a sheaf of paper '^lamp-lighters.'' He
probably rolls them himself , in his determined
retention of '^ atmosphere/'

His library and working-room, at all events,
is a i>er8onal apartment snch as does not seem
likely ever to be much affected by extraneous
hapi>ening8. His library opens upon a sort of
garden, which is mostly lawn and trees: this
side of the room I can only describe as made
of glass; for it is all one broad tall window,
in three compartments, with a window-seat
beneath. To-night the shutters were closed;
but still you were conscious of green grow-
ing things very close at hand. . . The other
walls are papered, as near as I remember, in a
brown leather-like shade, obscurely patterned
in dull gold: the bookcases ranged against
them are flagrantly irregular iu shape and
height, and convey the impression of having
been acquired one by one, as the increasing
number of books in the library demanded aug-
mented shelf-room. Above and between these
cases are fhe originals of various paintings

BEYOND LIFE

made to iUustrate the writings of John Char-
teris: and the walls are furthermore adorned
with nmnerons portraits of those whom Char-
teris described to me as his ^ ^literary cred-
itors/' • . This assemblage is sufficiently
curions. • •

Here^ then, we were sitting, toward nine
o'clock on a pleasant evening in May, what
time John Charteris apologized for having
nothing in particular to talk about I courte-
ously suggested that the circumstance was
never once aforetime known to keep him silent

^'Ah, but then you must remember/' says
Charteris, ^^that you find me a little let down
by a rather trying day. I devoted an arduous
morning to splashing about the room with a
tin basin and a couple of old towels, washing
off the glass in all my several million pictures.
They really do get terribly dirty, what with
their misguided owner's pertinacious efforts
toward ruining his health by incessant
smoking."

**But surely ! well, why on earth do you

attend to that sort of thing?"

"For the simple reason, my dear fellow, that

WE APPROACH

we never had a housegirl who could wash pio-
tores without slopping the water through at
the comers, and making unpleasant looking
brown spots. I practically exist in here: and
I find it worth my while to have my ^ lair just
what I want it^ even at the cost of doing my
own housecleaning. Picture-washing, after all,
is not so trying as polishing the furniture. I
do not so much mind the smell, but at times
it seems to me there is something vaguely
ridiculous in the spectacle of a highly gifted
novelist sitting upon the floor and devoting all
his undeniable ability to getting the proper
polish on a chair leg. Besides, I am not so
limber as I used to be.''

''At worst, though, Charteris, all this will
be an interesting trait for the Authorized Bi-
ography, — ^when some unusually discreet per-
son has been retained to edit and censor the
story of your life — '*

A bit forlornly he said: **Ah, yes, the story
of my life ! That reminds me I put in the after-
noon typing off some letters I had from a girl,
I very emphatically decline to say how many
years ago. I want to use her in the new book,
and f rom* letters, somehow, one gets more of a
genuine accent, of a real flavor, than it is easy

BEYOND LIFE

to invent. Indeed, as I grow older I find it im-
possible to 'do' a satisfactory heroine without
a packet of old love-letters to start on— and
to work in here and there, yon know, for dia-
logae. • . Ah, but then, in that tin box just
back of yonr chair, I have filed the letters
of eight women which I have not nsed yet,
and to-day I foolishly got to glancing over
the whole bndget. . . . And it was rather de-
pressing. It made my life, on looking back, seem
too mnch like a very loosely connected series of
short stories. The thing was not sonnd art
It lacked constmction, form, inevitability —
perhaps I cannot quite word what I mean!
But so many wonderful and generous women 1
and so much that once seemed so very impor-
tant! and nothing to come of any of it! Oh,
yes, old letters are infernal things."

''But useful for literary purposes," I sug-
gested, ''if only one happens to be a particu-
larly methodical and cold-blooded sort of
ghouL"

He shrugged. "Oh, yes, one has to be, in the
interest of romantic art I am afraid almost
everything is grist for that omnivorous milL
It seemed to me, this afternoon at least, that
even I was very like a character being carried

WE APPEOACH

over from one short story to another, and then
to yet another. And I coxdd not but suspect
that, so as to make me fit into my new sur-
roundings more exactly, at everytransf er I was
altered a bit, not always for the better. In fine,
there seems to be an Author who coarsens and
cheapens and will some day obliterate me, in
order to serve the trend of some big serial he
has in course of publication. For as set against
that, I am of minor importance. Indeed, it was
perhaps simply to further this purpose that he
created me. I wonder f

'^Your notion,'' I observed, with dignity,
"has been elsewhere handled *'

"But it has not been disposed of," retorted
GharteriSy "and it will never down. The riddle
of the Author and his puppets, and of their
true relations, stays forever unanswered. And
no matter from what standpoint you look at it,
there seems an element of unfairness. . .''

"The Author works according to his
creed '*

"But we do not know what it is. We cannot
even guess. Ah, I dare say you wonder quite
as often as I do what the Author is up to.''
And I regarded the little man with real tender-
ness : for I saw that he justified the far-fetched

BEYOND LIFE

analogae I had aforetime employed in speaking
of John Gharteris, when I likened him to a quiz-
zical black parrot . . .

**Probably no author,*' I suggested, **can
ever, quite, put his actual working creed into
any hard and fast words that satisfy him."
' ''But no self-respecting author, my dear man,
has ever pretended to put anything into words
that satisfied him."

''Well, for one, I write my books as well as
I can. I have my standards, undoubtedly, and
I value them "

"You tell us, in effect^ that Queen Aime is
dead."

"And I believe them to be the standards of
every person that ever wrote a re-readable
book. Yet I question if I could tell you pre-
cisely what these standards are."

"They are very strikingly exemplified, how-
ever"— and John Charteris waved his hand, —
"on every side of us. But how can you hope
to judge of books, who have never read any
author in the only satisfactory edition?" . .

For we were sitting, I may repeat, in his

WE APPEOAOH

library at Willoughby Hall, where I had often
been before. Bnt I had never thought to ex-
amine his bookshelves, as I did now • • •

**Why, what on earth, Charteris 1 The

Complete Works of David Gopperfield:
(Envrea de Luden de Bubempre: Novels
and Tales of Mark Ambient: Novels of Titus
Scrope: The Works of Arthur Pendennis:
Complete Writings of Eustace Cleever: Works
of Bartholomew Josselin: Poems of (}ervase
Poore: The Works of Colney Durance:" —
hastily I ran over some of the titles. **Why,
what on earth are all these library sets?"

^^That section of the room is devoted to the
books of the gifted writers of Bookland. You
will observe it is extensive; for the wonderful
literary genius is by long odds the most com-
mon character in fiction. You will find all my
books over there, I may diffidently remark."

"H'm, yes," said I,— '*no doubt!"

But I was inspecthig severally Lord Ben-
dish's BUliad and The Wanderer; and A Man
of Words, by Felix Wildmay; and The Amber
Statuette, by Lucien Taylor; and the Collected
Essays of Ernest Pontifex; and in particular,
an interesting publication entitled The Nimga-
punga Booh, by G. B. Torpenhow, with Numer-

BEYOND LIFE

ons niustrations by Bidiard Heldar . . . •
And I even looked provisionally into An
Essay upon Castametation, tc ith some particu-
lar Remarks upon the Vestiges of Ancient
Fortifications lately discovered by the Author
at the Kaim of Kinprunes . • •

Then I became aware of farther food for
wonder. **Why, bnt what's Uns— Sophia Scar-
let, The Shovels of Newton French, Cannon-
mUls, The Rising Sun — ^7ou seem to have a lot
of Stevenson's I never heard of."

^^ Those shelves contain the cream of the
unwritten books — ^the masterpieces that were
planned and never carried throngh. Of them
also, yon perceive, there are a great many. In-
deed, a nmnber of persons who never published
a line have contributed to that section. Yes,
that is Thackeray's mediaeval romance of Agin-
court. Dickens, as you see, has several novels
there: perhaps The Young Person and The
Children of the Fathers are the best, but they
all belong to his later and failing period "

'^But the unwritten books appear to run
largely to verse

WE APPROACH

** 'For many men are poets in fheir yonth^
and in their second childhood also. That
Keats' epic thing is rather disappointing: and,
for one, I cannot agree with Hawthorne's friend
that it contains 'the loftiest strains which have
been heard on earth since Milton's day.' Mil-
ton's own King Arthur, by the by, is quite his
most readable performance. And thatf— oh,
yes, the oomplete Christahel falls off toward the
end and becomes fearfully long-winded. And
the last six books of The Faery Queen and the
latter Canterbury Tales are simply beyond hu-
man patience "

''Then too there is a deal of drama. But
what is Sheridan doing iu this galley f"

"Why, that volume is an illustrated edition
of Sheridan's fine comedy, Affectation, which
he mulled over during the last thirty years of
his life: and it is undisputedly his masterpiece.
The main treasure of my library, though, is
that unbound collection of the Unwritten Plays
of Christopher Marlowe.''

"This part of the, room, at least"— for I
was still nosing about — "appears to exhibit
much the usual lot of standard books "

BEYOND LIFE

<<Ahy if those only were the ordinary stand-
ards for inducing sleep 1" — and Charteris
shrugged. '^ Instead, those are the books with
which you are familiar, as the authors meant
them to be.''

''Then even Shakespeare came an occasional
cropper ?**

''Oh, that is the 1599 version of TroUus <md
Cressida — ^the only edition in which the play is
anything like comprehensible . . • You have
no idea how differently books read in the In-
tended Edition. Why, even your own books,"
added Charteris, "in that Intended Edition
yonder, issued through Enappe & Dreme — who
bring out, indeed, the only desirable edition of
most authors — ^are such as you might read with
pleasure, and even a mild degree of pride.''

"Go on!" said I, '*for now I know you are
talking nonsense."

"Upon my word," said he, "I really mean
it." . .

Then, and then only, did I comprehend the
singularity of that unequalled collection of
literary masterpieces. . . "Man, man!" I
said, in envy, "if I had shared your oppor-

WE APPEOACH

tnnities I would know well enough what a book
ought to be. I might even be able to formulate
the aesthetic creed of which I was just
speaking."

^'I have heard, though,'' said Charteris, with
a grin, ^'that a quite definite sort of a some-
thing in this line has been accomplished. How
was it Mr. Wilson Follett summed it upf Oh,
yes I — ^Seduced to baldness, the argument is
this: Since first-class art has never reproduced
its own contemporary background (for some
reason or other the romanticist does not ad-
duce Jane Austen in support of this truism),
and since the novel of things-as-they-are calls
for no constructive imagination whatever in
author or reader, the present supply of ** real-
ism'' is nothing but the publisher's answer to
a cheap and fickle demand; and since the im-
aginative element in art is all but everything,
the only artist who has a chance of longevity
is he who shuns the "vital", the ''gripping",
and the contemporary.' Surely, that ought to
be a creed quite definite enough for anybody
accused of being committed to it."

** Quite," I conceded — ^*' especially since the
charge is laid by a person whose dicta I am
accustomed to revere and, elsewhere, to delight

BEYOND LIFE

in. Now to me that creed, as originally stated,
read infinitely plainer than a pikestaff. Yet you
see what an actually noteworthy critic like Mr.
FoUett makes of it: whereas, to the other side,
one of the least frivolous of our comic weeklies,
The Independent, described that very exposi-
tion of romantic ideals as ^fatuous'; and The
New York Times was moved to mild deploring
that the thing had not been suppressed. So I
am afraid it was not put with entire exactness
after alL''

Gharteris reflected ''At least,'' he sidd, in
a while, ''I would not have phrased it quite
iu Mr. Follett's manner, which reduces to bald-
ness an argument that is entitled to hair-
splitting. For nothing, even remotely, can
compare with romance in importance. I
am not speaking merely of that especial
manifestation of romance which is sold in
book-form. . . Well, as you may recall, I have
been termed the founder of ^e Economist
school of literature. I accept the distinction for
what it is worth, and probably for a deal more.
And I believe the Economist creed as to the
laws of that 'life beyond life' which Mil-
ton attributes to good books could be ex-
plicitly stated in a few minutes. Of course, it

WE APPROACH

does require a little reading-up, in some library
not less well stocked than mine with the really
satisfactory editions."

''Then do yon state it,'' I exhorted, ''and
save me the trouble of puzzling over it any
longer." . • It was then a trifle after nine
in the evening. • .

"Off-hand," began John Charteris, "I would
say that books are best insured against oblivion
through practise of the auctorial virtues of
distinction and darity, of beauty and sym-
metry, of tenderness and truth and ur-
bani^. . •"

But— as you may hereinafter observe if such
be your willr— he did not explain his theories
"in a few minutes." In fact, the little man
talked for a long while, even until dawn; and
as it appeared to me, not always quite con-
sistently. And he seemed to take an impish
delight in his own discursiveness, as he ran
on, in that wonderfully pleasing voice of his:
and he shifted from irony to earnestness, and
back again, so irresponsibly that I was not
always sure of his actual belief.

Thus it was that John Charteris discoursed,

BEYOND LIFE

as he sat there^ just beyond the broad and
gleaming expanse of desk-top, talking, interm-
inably talking. The hook-nosed little fellow
looks, nowadays, incredibly withered and an-
cient : one might liken him to a Pharaoh newly
unwrapped were it not for his very miregid
restlessness. And his eyes, too, stay young and
a trifle puzzled. . . So Qiarteris talked: and
animatedly he twisted in his swivel-chair, now
toward me, now toward the unabridged dic-
tionary mounted on a stand at his right elbow,
and now toward the ashtray at his left. For of
course he smoked I do not pretend to estimate
how many cigarettes • . . Meanwhile he
talked: and he talked in very much that redun-
dant and finicky and involved and inverted
*' style" of his writings; wherein, as you have
probably noted, the infrequent sentence which
does not begin with a connective or with an
adverb comes as a positive shock. . .

And sometimes he talked . concerning men
who have made literature, and spoke sensibly
enough, although with a pervasive air of
knowing more than anyone else ever did. And
sometimes he discoursed enigmas, concerning
the power of romance, which he pretentiously
called ^'the demiurge'', as being a world-

WE APPROACH

shaping and world-controlling principle: and
this appeared a plausible tenet when advanced
by Charteris, if only because he declared
himself to be a character out of romantic fic-
tion; but I have since been tempted to ques-
tion the theory's quite general application.
And he talked a deal^ too, concerning the '^dy-
namic illusions'' evolved by romance, which
phrase I still consider unhappy, for all that
deliberation suggests no synonym. • •

His notion, as I followed him, was that ro-
mance controlled the minds of men; and by
creating force-producing illusions, furthered
the world's betterment with the forces thus
brought into being: so that each generation of
naturally inert mortals was propelled toward
a higher sphere and manner of living, by the
might of each generation's ignorance and
prejudices and follies and stupidities, benefi-
cently directed To me this sounded in every
way Economical And as he ran on, I really
seemed to glimpse, under the spell of that
melodious voice, romance and '^realism" as
the contending Ormuzd and Ahrimanes he

BEYOND LIFE

depicted; and the ends for which these two con-
tended as not merely scriptoriaL • •

But I too run on. It is more equitable to
let John Charteris speak for himself, and ex-
press uninterruptedly the creed of what he
called the Economist theory, as to literature
and human affairs in general • •

THE DEMIURGE

— ^WIiAt is BuWi that his irelfare be eonsideredf — an
ape who chatters to himself of kinship with the archangels
while filthily he digs for groundnutB. . . .

— ^Yet more dearly do I pereeiye that this same man
is a maimed god. ... He is under penalty condemned
to compute eternity with false weights and to estimate
infinity with a yardstick; and he very often does it. . . .

— ^There lies the choice which every man must make —
or rationally to accept his own limitations f or stupen-
dously to play the fool and swear that he is at will
omnipotentf

^DitaSn det Beines

MhM^rt^itfWi^ta

Which Deals with the Demiurge

OFF-HAND (began John Charteris) I
would say lliat books are best insured
against oblivion through practise of the
auctorial virtues of distinction and clarity, of
beauty and symmetry, of tenderness and truth
and urbanity. That covers the ground, I
think: and so it remains merely to cite sup-
porting instances here and there, by mention-
ing a few writers who have observed these
requirements, and thus to substantiate my
formula without unnecessary divigation. . .
Therefore I shall be very brief. And even
so, I imagine, you will not be inclined to listen
to much of what I am about to say, if only
because, like most of us, you are intimidated
by that general attitude toward culture and the
humanities which has made of American litera-
ture, among foreign penmen, if not precisely
an object of despairing envy, at least of feel-
ing comment In particular, I imagine that
my frequent references to the affairs and

BEYOND LIFE

people of fled years will annoy yon, since the
American book-purchaser shies from such
pedantic, and indeed from any, allusion to the
past, with that distrust peculiar to persons
with criminal records. In fact, this murderer,
too, is often haunted, I dare say, by memories
of his victim, in thinking of the time he has
killed, whether with the "uplifting'* or with
the "daring** current novels of yesterday.

But you perceive, I trust, that your personal
indifference, and the lazy contempt of America
as a whole, toward art matters no more affects
the eternal verity and the eternal importance
of art than do the religious practises of Abys-
sinia, say, affect the verity and importance of
the New Testament. You perceive, I trust, that
you ought to be interested in art matters,
whatever is your actual emotion. You under-
stand, in fine — ^as a mere abstract principle —
what your feeling "ought to be." Well, it is
precisely that tendency to imagine yourself and
your emotions as these things "ought to be*'
which convicts you, over any verbal disclaimer,
of a vital interest in art matters : and it is that
tendency about which I propose to speak very
briefly. . .

And yet, so insidious is the influence of

THE DEMIURGE

general opinion, even when manifested as plain
nnreason, that I confess I myself, whenever
anyone talks of **art*' and **»sthetic the-
ories", am inclined to find him vagaely ridicu-
lous, and seem to detect in every word he utters
a flavor of affectation. So shoidd you prove
quite as susceptible as I to the herd-instinct I
shall have no ground for complaint Mean-
while in theory — ^without of necessity accom-
panying my friend Felix Kennaston aU the way
to his conclusion that the sum of corporeal life
represents an essay in romantic fiction,— I can
perceive plainly enough that the shape-giving
principle of all sentient beings is artistic. That
is a mere matter of looking at living creatures
and noticing their forms. . . But the prin-
ciple goes deeper, in that it shapes too the
minds of men, by this universal tendency to
imagine — ^and to think of as in reality existent
— all the tenants of earth and all the affairs
of earth, not as they are, but **as they ought
to be''. And so it comes about that romance
has invariably been the demiurgic and bene-
ficent force, not merely in letters, but in every
matter which concerns mankind ; and that * ^ real-
ism'', with its teaching that the mil^posts
along the road are as worthy of consideration

BEYOND LIFE

as the goal| has always figured as man's chief
enemy. • •

Indeed, that scathing criticism which So-
phocles passed, however anciently on a con-
temporary, remains no less familiar than sig-
nificant, — ^'^He paints men as they are: I paint
them as they ought to be/' It. is aside from
the mark that la imputing such veracity to
Euripides the singer of Colonos was talking
nonsense: the point is that Sophocles Baw
clearly what was the one unpardonable sin
against art and human welfare.

For the Greeks, who were nurtured among
art's masterworks, recognized, with much of
that perturbing candor wherewith children
everywhere appraise their associates, that
gracefully to prevaricate about mankind and
human existence was art's signal function. As
a by-product of this perception, Hellenic litera-
ture restrained its endeavors, quite naturally,
to embroidering events that were incontest-
able because time had erased the evidence for
or against their actual occurrence: and poets
evoked protagonists worth noble handling from
bright mists of antiquity, wherethrough, as far

THE DBMIUEGE

as went existent proofs, men might in reality
have moved **as they onght to be". Thus, even
Homer, the most ancient of great verbal artists,
elected to deal with legends that in his day were
venerable: and in Homer when Ajax lifts a
stone it is with the strength of ten wamors,
and Odyssens, when it at all promotes the
progress of the story, becomes invisible. It
seems — upon the whole — ^less probable that
Homer drew either of these accomplishments
from the actnal human life about him, than
from simple consciousness that it would be very
gratifying if men could do these things. And,
indeed, as touches enduring art, to write
''with the eye upon the object" appears a- rela-
tively modem pretence, perhaps not uncon-
BBcted with the coetaneous phrase of ''all my
eye."

Then, when the Attic drama came to flower-
age, the actors were masked, so that their fea-
tures might display unhuman perfection; and
were mounted upon cothurni, to lend impres-
siveness to man's physical mediocrity; and
were clothed in draperies which philanthropic-
ally eclipsed humanity's frugal graces. In
painting or sculpture, where the human body
could be idealized with a free hand, the Greek

BEYOND LIFE

rale was nakedness: in drama, where the
artist's material was incorrigible flesh, there
was nothing for it save to disguise the uncap-
tivating groundwork through some discreet
employment of fair apparel. Thus only could
the audience be hoodwinked into forgetting
for a while what men and women really looked
like. So in drama Theseus declaimed in im-
perial vestments, and in sculpture wore at the
very most a fig-leaf. It is hardly necessary to
point out that the Greeks shared few of our
delusions concerning ** decency *^ for, of course,
they had no more moral aversion to a man's
appearing naked in the street than to a toad's
doing so, and objected simply on the ground
that both were ugly* So they resolutely wrote
about — and carved and painted, for that
matter— men **as they ought to be" doing
such things as it would be gratifying for men
to do if these feats were humanly possible. . •
And in the twilit evening of Greek literature
you will find Theocritus clinging with unshaken
ardor to unreality, and regaling the townfolk
of Alexandria with tales of an improbable
Sicily, where the inhabitants are on terms of
friendly intimacy with cydopes, water-nymphs
and satyrs.

THE DEMIURGE

Equally in the Middle Ages did literature
avoid deviation into the credible. When carpets
of brocade were spread in April meadows it
was to the end that barons and ladies might
listen with delight to peculiarly unplausible
accounts of how Sire Roland held the pass at
Roncevaux single-handed against an army, and
of Lancelot's education at the bottom of a pond
by elfin pedagogues, and of how Virgil builded
Naples upon eggshells. When English-speak-
ing tale-tellers began to concoct homespun
romances they selected such themes as Bevis
of Southampton's addiction to giant-killings
and Guy of Warwick's encounter with a man-
eating cow eighteen feet long, and the exploits
of Thomas of Reading, who exterminated an
infinity of dragons and eloped with Prester
John's daughter after jilting the Queen of
Fairyland. Chaucer, questionless, was so in-
judicious as to dabble in that muddy stream
of contemporaneous happenings which time
alone may clarify: but the parts of Chaucer
that endure are a Eoiight's story of mytho-
logical events, a Prioress's unsubstantiated
accouBt of a miracle^ a Nun's Priest's anticipa-

BEYOND LIFE

tion of Bostand's barnyard fantasy, and a ream
or two of other delightful flimflams. From his
contemporaries Chaucer got such matter as the
Miller's tale of a clerk's misadventures in
osculation.

But with the Invention of printing, thoughts
spread so expeditiously that it became possible
to acquire quite serviceable ideas without the
trouble of thinking: and very few of us since
then have cared to risk impairment of our
minds by using them. A consequence was that,
with inaction, man's imagination in general
grew more sluggish, and demurred, just as
mental indolence continues to balk, over the
exertion of conceiving an unfamiliar locale, in
any form of art The deterioration, of course,
was gradual, and for a considerable while
theatrical audiences remained receptively illit-
erate. And it seems at first sight gratifying
to note that for a lengthy period Marlowe was
the most '^popular" of the Elizabethan .play-
wrights: for in Marlowe's superb verse there
is really very little to indicate that the writer
had ever encountered any human beings, and
certainly nothing whatever to show that he had

THE DEMIURGE

seriously considered this especial division of
fauna: whereas all his scenes are laid some-
where a long way west of the Hesperides. Yet
Marlowe's popularity, one cannot but suspect,
was furthered by unsBsthetic aids, in divers
''comic" scenes which time has beneficently
destroyed At all events, complaisant dram-
atists, out of a normal preference for butter
with their daily bread, soon began to romance
about contemporary life. It is not Shakes-
peare's least claim to applause that he sedu-
lously avoided doing anything of the sort. To
the other side, being human, Shakespeare was
not untainted by the augmenting trend toward
''realism", and in depicting his fellows was
prone to limit himself to exaggeration of their
powers of fancy and diction. This, as we now
know, is a too sparing employment of untruth-
fulness : and there is ground for sharp arraign-
ment of the imbecility attributed to Lear, and
Othello, and Hamlet, and Macbeth, and Borneo
— ^to cite only a few instances, — ^by any candid
estimate of tiieir actions, when deprived of the
transfiguring glow wherewith Shakespeare in-
vests what is being done, by evoking a haze
of lovely words. For really, to go mad be-
cause a hostess resents your bringing a hun-

BEYOND LIFE

dred servants on a visits, or to murder your
wife because she has misplaced a handkerchief,
is much the sort of conduct which is daily
chronicled by the morning-paper; and in char-
ity to man's self-respect should be restricted
to the ostentatious impermanence of journal-
ism. But at bottom Shakespeare never dis-
played any very hearty admiration for human-
ity as a race, and would seem to have found
not many more commendable traits in general
exercise among mankind than did the authors
of the Bible.

Few of the art-reverencing Elizabethans,
however, handled the surrounding English life:
when they dealt with the contemporaneous it
was with a reassuringly remote Italian back-
groundy against which almost anything might
be supposed to happen, in the way of pictur-
esque iniquity and poisoned wine : so that they
composed with much of that fine irresponsi-
bility wherewith American journalists expose
the court-life of Madrid. But the Jacobean
drama tended spasmodically toward untruths
about its audience's workaday life, with such de-
pressing results as Hyde Park, The Roaring
Oirl and The New Inn, by men who in the field
of unrestricted imagination had showed them-

THE DEMIURGE

selves to be possessed of genuine ability.

Then came the gallant protest of the Bes-
toration^ when Wycherley and his successors
in dranxai commenced to write of contemporary
life in much the spirit of modem musical com-
edy, which utilizes a fac-simile of tlie New
York Pennsylvania Railway Station, or of the
Capitol at Washington, as an appropriate
setting for a ballet and a comedian's colloquy
with the orchestra leader. Thus here the scenes
are in St. James's Park, outside Westminster,
in the New Exchange, and in other places
familiar to the audience; and the characters
barter jokes on current events: but the laws
of the performers' mimic existence are frankly
extra-mundane, and their antics, in Restoration
days as now, would have subjected them to im-
mediate arrest upon the auditorial side of foot-
lights. A great deal of queer nonsense has
been printed concerning the comedy of Gal-
lantry, upon the startling assumption that its
authors copied the life about them. It is true
that Wycherley, in this the first of English
authors to go astray, began the pernicious
practise of depicting men as being not very

BEYOND LIFE

much better than they actually are: of that I
will speak later: but Wycherley had the saving
grace to present his men and women as tram-
meled by the social restrictions of Cloud-
Cad:oo-Land alone. And, were there nothing
else, it seems improbable that Congreve, say,
really believed that every yomig fellow spoke
habitually in terms of philosophic wit and
hated his father; and that every old hunks pos-
sessed, more or less vicariously, a beautiful
second wife; and that people married without
licenses, or, indeed, without noticing very par-
ticularly whom they were marrying; and that
monetary competence and happiness and all-
important documents, as well as a sudden turn
for heroic verse, were regularly accorded to
everybody toward eleven o'clock in the evening.

Thus far the illiterate ages, when as yet so
few persons could read that literature tended
generally toward the acted drama. The stage
could supply much illusory assistance, in the
way of pads and wigs and grease-paints and
soft lightings, toward making men appear he-
roic and women charming: but, after all, the
roles were necessarily performed by human

THE DEMIUBGE

beings, and the charitable deceit was not con-
tinnons. The audience was ever and anon being
reminded, against its firm-set will, that men
were mediocre creatures.

Nor could the poets, however rapidly now
multiplied their verse-books, satisfactorily de-
lude their patrons into overlooking this un-
pleasant fact. For one reason or another, men
as a whole have never taken kindlily to printed
poetry: most of us are unable to put up with
it at all, and even to the exceptional person
verse after an hour's reading becomes unac-
countably tiresome. Prose — ^f or no very patent
cause — ^is much easier going. So the poets
proved ineffectual comforters, who could but
rarely be-drug even the few to whom their
charms did not seem gibberish.

With the advent of the novel, all this was
changed. Not merely were you relieved from
metrical fatigue, but there came no common-
place flesh-and-blood to give the lie to the
artist's pretensions. It was possible, really for
the first time, acceptably to present in litera-
ture men ^^as they ought to be." Richardson
could dilate as unrestrainedly as he pleased
upon the super-eminence in virtue and sin, re-
spectively, of his Qrandison and his Lovelace

BEYOND LIFE

emboldened by the knowledge that there was
nothing to check him off save the dubious
touchstone of his reader's common-sense.
Fielding was not only able to conduct a broad-
shouldered young ruffian to fortune and a lovely
wife, but could moreover endow Tom Jones
with all sorts of heroic and estimable qualities
such as (in mere tmimportant fact) rascals do
not display in actual life. When the novel suc-
ceeded the drama it was no longer necessary for
the artist to represent human beings with even
partial veracity: and this new style of writing
at once became emblematic.

And so it has been ever since. Novelists
have severally evolved their pleasing symbols
wherewith approximately to suggest human be-
ings and the business of human life, much as
remote Egyptians drew serrated lines to con-
vey the idea of water and a circle to indicate
eternity. The symbols have often varied: but
there has rarely be^n any ill-advised attempt to
depict life as it seems in the living of it, or
to crystallize the vague notions and feeble sen-
sations with which human beings, actually,
muddle through to an epitaph; if only because
all sensible persons, obscurely aware that this
routine is far from what it ought to be, have

THE DEMIUBGE

always preferred to deny its existence. And
moreover, we have come long ago to be guided
in any really decisive speech or action by what
we have read somewhere; and so, may fairly
daim that literature should select (as it does)
such speeches and such actions as typical of
our essential lives, rather than the gray inter-
stices, which we perforce fiU in extempore, and
botch.

As concerns the novelists of the day before
yesterday, this evasion of veracity is already
more or less conceded: the ^^platitudinous he-
roics'' of Scott and the ** exaggerated senti-
mentalism'' of Dickens are notorious in quite
authoritative circles whose dticdame is the hon-
est belief that art is a branch of pedagogy.
Thackeray, as has been pointed out elsewhere,
avoids many a logical outcome of circumstance,
when recognition thereof would be inconvenient,
by killing off somebody and blinding the reader
with a tear-drenched handkerchief. And when
we sanely appraise the most cried-up writer of
genteel " realism'*, matters are not conducted
much more candidly. Here is a fair sample : —
**From the very beginning of my acquaintance
with you, your manners, impressing me with
the fullest belief of your arrogance, your con-

BEYOND LIFE

oeity and your selfish disdain of the feelings
of others, were such as to form that ground-
work of disapprobation on which succeeding
events have built so immovable a dislike, and
I had not known you a month before I felt that
you were the last man in the world whom I
could ever be prevailed on to marry/' It is
Miss Austen's most famous, most beloved, and
most **natural" character replying— not by
means of a stilted letter, but colloquially, under
the stress of emotion— to a proposal of mar-
riage by the man she loves. This is a crisis
which in human life a normal yotmg woman
simply does not meet with any such rhetorical
architecture. • • So there really seems small
ground for wonder that Mr. Darcy observed,
^^You have said quite enough, madam"; and
no cause whatever for surprise that he hastily
left the room, and was heard to open the front-
door and quit the house. . . Yet, be it forth-
with added, Scott and Dickens and Thackeray,
and even Miss Austen, were in the right, from
one or another SBsthetic standpoint, in thus
variously editing and revising their contem-
poraries ' unsatisfactory disposition of life.
Indeed, upon no plea could they be bound to
emulate malfeasance.

THE DEMIUBGE

Criticism as to the veracity of more recent
writers is best dismissed with the well-merited
commendation that novelists to-day continue
rigorously to respect the Second Command-
ment Meanwhile it may, with comparative
saf ety, be pointed out that no interred writer
of widely conceded genius has ever displayed
in depicting the average of human speech and
thought and action, and general endowments,
such exactness as would be becoming in an affi-
davit; but rather, when his art touched on
these dangerous topics, has regarded romantic
prevarication as a necessity. The truth about
ourselves is the one truth, above all others,
which we are adamantine not to face. And this
determination springs, not wholly from vanity,
but from a profound race-sense that by such
denial we have little to lose, and a great deal
to gain.

For, as has been said before, an inveterate
Sophocles notes clearly that veracity is the
one unpardonable sin, not merely against art,
but against human welfare. • • • You will
observe that the beginnings of fiction every-
where, among all races, take with curious un-

BEYOND LIFE

animity the same form. It is always the history
of the milooked-for achievements and the ulti-
mate very public triumph of the ill-used young-
est son. From the myth of Zeus, third son of
ChronoSy to the third prince of the fairy-tale,
there is no exception. Everywhere it is to the
despised weakling that romance accords the
final and very public victory. For in the life-
battle for existence it was of course the men
of puniest build who first developed mental
ability, since hardier compeers, who took with
bloodied hands that which they wanted, had
no especial need of less reliable makeshifts:
and everywhere this weakling, quite naturally,
afforded himself in imagination what the force
of circumstance denied him in fact Competent
persons, then as now, had neither the time nor
ability for literature.

By and bye a staggering stroke of genius
improved the tale by adding the handicap of
sex-weakness: and Cinderella (whom romance
begot and deified as Psyche) straightway led
captive every dreamer's hitherto unvoiced de-
sire. This is the most beloved story in the
world's library, and, barring a tremendous
exception to which I shall presently return, will
always remain without rival Any author any-

THE DEMIUBGS

where can gain men's love by remodeUng (not
too drastically) the history of Cinderella: thou-
sands of calligraphic persons have, of course,
availed themselves of this fortnnate droam-
stance: and the seeming miracle is that the
naive and the most sophisticated continue to
thrill, at each re-telling of the hackneyed story,
with the instant response of fiddlestrings, to
an interpretation of life which one is tempted
to describe as fiddlesticks. Yet an inevitable
very public triumph of the downtrodden^-with
all imaginable pomp and fanfare — ^is of neces-
sity a tenet generally acceptable to a world of
ineffectual inhabitants, each one of whom is a
monarch of dreams incarcerated in a prison of
flesh; and each of whom is hourly fretted, no
less by the indifference of nature to his plight,
than by the irrelevancy thereto of those social
orderings he dazedly ballots into existence. « .
Christianity, with its teaching that the op*
pressed shall be exalted, and the unhappy made
free of eternal bliss, thus came in the nick of
occasion, to promise what the run of men were
eager to believe. Such a delectable prospect,
irrespective of its plausibility, oould not in the
nature of things fail to become popular: as
has been strikingly attested by man's wide

BEYOND LIF!B

acceptance of the rather exigent requirements
of Christianity, and his honest endeavors ever
since to interpret them as meaning whatever
happens to be convenient

In similar fashion, humanity would seem at
an early period to have wrenched comfort from
prefiguring man as the hero of the cosmic ro-
mance. For it was unpleasantly apparent that
man did not excel in physical strength, as set
against the other creatures of a planet whereon
may be encountered tigers and elephants. His
senses were of low development, as compared
with the senses of insects : and, indeed, senses
possessed by some of these small contempor-
aries man presently found he did not share, nor
very clearly understand The luxury of wings,
and even ike common comfort of a caudal ap-
pendage, was denied him. He walked painfully,
without hoofs, and, created naked as a shelled
almond, with difficulty outlived a season of in-
clement weather. Physically, he displayed in not
a solitary trait a product of nature's more am-
bitious labor. • • He, thus, surpassed the rest
of vital creation in nothing except, as was begin-
ning to be rumored, the power to reason; and
even so, was apparently too magnanimous to
avail himself of the privilege.

THE DEMIUBGE

Bat to acknowledge such disoonoerting facts
would never do: jnst as inevitably, therefore,
as the peafowl came to listen with condescen-
sion to the nightingale, and the tortoise to de-
plore the slapdash ways of his contemporaries,
man probably began very early to regale him-
self with flattering narratives as to his nature
and destiny. Among the countless internecine
animals that roamed earth, puissant with daw
and fang and sinew, an ape reft of his tail, and
grown rusty at climbing, was the most formid-
able, and in the end would triumph. It was of
course considered blasphemous to inquire into
the grounds for this belief, in view of its patent
desirability, for the race was already human*
So the prophetic portrait of man treading
among cringing pleosauri to browbeat a fright-
ened dinosaur was duly scratched upon the
cave's wall, and art began forthwith to accredit
human beings with every trait and destiny
which they desiderated . .

And so to-day, as always, we delight to
hear about invincible men and women of un-
earthly loveliness— corrected and considerably
augmented versions of our family circle, — ^per-
forming feats illimitably beyond our modest
powers. And so to-day no one upon the pref er-

BEYOND LIFE

able side of Bedlam wishes to be reminded of
what we are in actuality, even were it possible,
by any disastrous miracle, ever to dispel the
mist which romance has evoked about all human
doings; and to the golden twilight of which old
usage has so accustomed us that, like nocturnal
birds, our vision grows perturbed in a clearer
atmosphere. And we have come very firmly
to believe in the existence of men everywhere,
not as in fact they are, but ^'as they ought to
be''.

Now art, like all the other noteworthy factors
in this remarkable world, serves in the end
utilitarian purposes. When a trait is held up
as desirable, for a convincingly long while, the
average person, out of self-respect, pretends to
possess it: with time, he acts letter-perfect as
one endowed therewith, and comes unshakably
to believe that it has guided him from infancy.
For while everyone is notoriously swayed by
appearances, this is more especially true of his
own appearance: cleanliness is, if not actually
next to godliness, so far a promoter of benevo-
lence that no man feels upon quite friendly

THE DEMIUEGB

teims with his fellow-beings when oonsdouB
that he needs a shave; and if in grief yon reso*
lutely contort your month into a smile yon
somehow do become forthwith aware of a con-
siderable mitigation of misery. ... So it
is that man's vanity and hypocrisy and lack
of dear thinking are in a fair way to prove in
the ontcome his salvation.

AU is vanity, qnoth the son of David, invert-
ing the tmth for popular consumption, as be-
came a wise Preacher who knew that vanity is
alL For man alone of animals plays the ape
to his dreams. That a dog dreams vehemently
is matter of public knowledge: it is perfectly
possible that in his more ecstatic visions he
usurps the shape of his master, and visits
Elysian pantries in human form: with awak-
ening, he observes that in point of fact he is a
dog, and as a rational animal, makes the best
of canineship. But with man the case is other-
wise, in that when logic leads to any humili-
ating conclusion, the sole effect is to discredit
logic'

So has man's indomitable vanity made a
harem of his instincts, and walled off a seraglio
wherein to beget the virtues and refinements
and all ennobling factors in man's long prog-

BEYOND LIFE

res8 from gorillaship. As has been suggested,
creative literature would seem to have sprung
dimply from the instinct of any hurt animal
to seek revenge, — ^and 'Ho get even'', as the
phrase runs, in the field of imagination when
such revenge was not feasible in any other
arena. . • Then, too, it is an instinct common
to brute creatures that the breeding or even
the potential mother must not be bitten, — ^upon
which modest basis a little by a little mankind
builded the fair code of domnei, or woman-
worship, which yet does yeoman service among
legislators toward keeping half our citizens
''out of the mire of politics.'' From the shud-
dering dread that beasts manifest toward un-
comprehended forces, such as wind and thun-
der and tall waves, man developed religion, and
a consoling assurance of divine paternity. And
when you come to judge what he made of sexual
desire, appraising the deed in view as against
the wondrous overture of courtship and that
infinity of high achievements which time has
seen performed as grace-notes, words fail be-
fore his egregious thaumaturgy. For after any
such stupendous bit of hocus-pocus, there seems
to be no limit fixed to the conjurations of human
vanity.

THE DEMIUEGB

And these aspiring notions blended a great
while since, into what may be termed the
Chivalrons attitude toward life. Thus it is that
romance, the real demiurge, the first and love-
liest daughter of human vanity, contrives all
those dynamic illusions which are used to fur-
ther the ultimate ends of romance. . • The
cornerstone of Chivalry I take to be the idea
of vicarship: for the chivalrous person is, in
his own eyes at least, the child of God, and
goes about this world as his Father's repre-
sentative in an alien country. It was very
adroitly to human pride, through an assump-
tion of man's personal responsibility in his
tiniest action, that Chivalry made its appeal;
and exhorted every man to keep faith, not
merely with the arbitrary will of a strong god,
but with himself. There is no cause for won-
der that the appeal was irresistible, when to
each man it thus admitted that he himself was
the one thing seriously to be considered. . .
So man became a chividrous animal; and about
this flattering notion of divine vicarship builded
his elaborate mediieval code, to which, in essen-
tials, a great number of persons adhere even

BEYOND LIFE

nowadays. Questionless, however, the Chival-
rous attitude does not very happily fit in with
modem conditions, whereby the self -elected
obligations of the knight-errant toward repres-
sing evil are (in theory at all events) more
efficadously discharged by an organized police
and a jury system*

And perhaps it was never, quite, a ** prac-
tical*' attitude, — mais qudle gestel as was
observed by a pre-eminently chivalrous person.
At worst, it is an attitude which one finds very
taking to the fancy as the posture is exempli-
fied by divers medisBval chroniclers, who had
sound notions about portraying men '^as they
ought to be". . . There is Nicolas de Caen,
for instance, who in his Dizain des Remes
(with which I am familiar, I confess, in the
English version alone) presents with some
naivete this notion of divine vicarship, in that
he would seem to restrict it to the nobility and
gentry. '^For royal persons and their imme-
diate associates '^ Dom Nicolas assumes at out-
set, ^'are the responsible stewards of Heaven":
and regarding them continuously as such, he
selects from the lives of various queens ten
cruoial moments wherein (as Nicolas phrases
it), '^Destiny has thrust her sceptre into the

THE DEMIURGE

hands of a human being, and left the weakling
free to steer the pregnant outcome. Now prove
thyself to be at bottom a god or else a beast^
saith Destiny, and now eternally abide that
choice/' Yet this, and this alone, when you
come to think of it, is what Destiny says, not
merely to '^ royal persons and their immediate
associates'', but to everyone. • • And in his
Roman de Lusignan Nicolas deals with that
quaint development of the Chivalrous attitude
to which I just alluded, that took form, as an
allied but individual illusion, in domnei, or
woman-worship ; and found in a man's mistress
an ever-present reminder, and sometimes a
rival, of God. There is something not unpa-
thetic in the thought that this once world-con-
trolling force is restricted to-day to removing a
man's hat in an elevator and occasionally com-
pelling a surrender of his seat in a streetcar.
• • • But this Romcm de Lusignan also has
been put into English, with an Afterword by
the translator wherein the theories of domnei
are rather painstakingly set forth: and thereto
I shall presently recur, for further considera-
tion of this illusion of domnei.

Throughout, of course, the Chivalrous atti-
tude was an intelligent attitude, in which

BEYOND LIFE

one spun romancea and accorded no meticu-
lous attention to mere facts. . . For thus
to spin romances is to bring about^ in every
sense, man's recreation, since man alone
of animals can, actually, acquire a trait by
assuming, in defiance of reason, that he
already possesses it. To spin romances is, in-
deed, man's proper and peculiar function in a
world wherein he only of created beings can
make no profitable use of the truth about him-
self. For man alone of animals plays the ape
to his dreams. So he fares onward chival-
rously, led by ignes fatui no doubt, yet moving
onward. And that the goal remains ambiguous
seems but a trivial circumstance to any living
creature who knows, he knows not how, that to
stay still can be esteemed a virtue only in the
dead

Indeed, when I consider the race to which
I have the honor to belong, I am filled with re-
spectful wonder. . . All about us flows and
gyrates unceasingly the material universe, — ^an
endless inconceivable jumble of rotatory blaz-
ing gas and frozen spheres and detonating com-
ets, wherethrough spins Earth like a frail

THE DEMIUBaE

midge. And to this blown molecule adhere what
millions and millions and millions of parasites
just such as I am, begetting and dreaming and
slaying and abnegating and toiling and making
mirth, jnst as did aforetime those countless ^gen-
erations of our forebears, every one of whom
was likewise a creature just such as I ami
Were the human beings that have been sub-
jected to confinement in flesh each numbered,
as is customary in other penal institutes, with
what interminable row of digits might one set
forth your number, say, or minet

Nor is this everything. For my reason, such
as it is, perceives this race, in its ^tirety, in
the whole outcome of its achievement, to be be-
yond all wording petty and ineffectual: and
no more than thought can estimate the relative
proportion to the material universe of our poor
Earth, can thought conceive with what quin-
tillionths to express that fractional part which
I, as an individual parasite, add to Earth's
negligible fretting by ephemera.

And still— behold the miracle t— still I believe
life to be a personal transaction between myself
and Omnipotence; I believe that what I do is
somehow of importance ; and I believe that I am
on a journey toward some very public triumph

BEYOND LIFE

not unlike that of the third prince in the fairy-
tale. • • Even to-day I believe in this dynamic
illusion. For that creed was the first great in-
spiration of the demiurge, — Oman's big roman-
tic idea of Chivalry, of himself as his Father'6
representative in an alien country; — ^and it is a
notion at which mere fact and reason yelp de-
nial unavailingly. For every one of us is so
constituted that he knows the romance to be
true, and corporal fact and human reason in
this matter, as in divers others, to be the
suborned and perjured witnesses of ^^realism".

THE WITCH-WOMAN

«^T<Ni t» ft terrible^ dAlidoaa wmnaal begotftfla en a
Hfttnr-demoiii people saj. I ask no qnestiona. • • •

—And so yon do not wdj longer either lore or bftte m^
Pwionf

—It Wat not I wbo lorad 700, bat ft Ix^ thftt if dead

— ^Yet I loTed yoo, Perion— oh, jee, in part I loved
jon« • • •

—80 thftt to-dfty I walk with ifiuMta, king's dftnghter:
and I am none the happier. . . .

<— It waa not for nothing that Preesina waa mj mother,
and I know manj things, pilfering light from the past to
abed it npon the faturew

^Momam de Luignan

Ill

Which Hints At the
Witch Woman

Yon perceive, fhen, it ia by the grace of
romance that man has been exalted above
the other animals. It was by romance,
in a fashion I have endeavored to make dear,
that mankind was endowed with all its virtues :
so we need hardly be surprised that to romance
mankind has likewise had to repair in search of
vices. Here, though, the demiurge would seem
to have been not quite so successful, perhaps
because men lacked the requisite inborn capac-
ity to attain any real distinction in wicked-
ness. • • Indeed, I question whether wicked-
ness is possible to humanity outside of litera-
ture. In books, of course, may be encountered
any number of competently evil people, who
take a proper pride in their depravity. But in
life men go wrong without dignity, and sin as
it were from hand to mouth. In life wrong-
doing seems deplorably prone to take form
either as a business necessity or as a public

BEYOND LIFE

nuisancey and in each avatar is shunned by the
considerate person.

Yes, in life the ** wicked" people are rather
pitiable, and quite hopelessly tedious as asso-
ciates. I suspect that the root of most evil is,
not so much the love of money, as the lack of
imagination: and few in fact deny that our
recognized ^^ criminals" are the victims of men-
tal inability to contrive and carry through this
or that infringement of the civil code in pre-
cisely the unobtrusive fashion of our leading
captains of industry. Yet the romantic have
always fabled that by whole-hearted allegiance
to evil this life in the flesh— by '^jumping",
as the Thane of Cawdor put it, any possible
life to come, — ^might be rendered vastly more
entertaining, and might even afford to the
sinner control of superhuman powers. Men
have always dreamed thus of evading the low
levels of everyday existence, and of augment-
ing their inadequate natural forces, by enter-
ing into some formal compact with eviL Hence
have arisen the innumerable legends of sorcer-
ers and witches, and the disfigurement of his-
tory with divers revolting chapters relative to
the martyrdom of half-witted old women so
injudicious as to maintain a cat And toward

THE WITCH-WOMAN'

8uoh chapters it seems needful momentarily to
digress, by very briefly indicating certain vul-
gar notions about the witch-woman, so as to
make dear what I have in mind as to another
dynamic illusion; and needful, too, to speak of
these chapters with flippant levity, because such
enormities grow unbearable when regarded
seriously. • .

T^tchcraft, if it were not indeed the first
manifestation of '^feminism'^ was practised
almost exclusively by women. There has been
a feebly paradoxical attempt to contend that
the Devil was the original witch, when he played
the impostor with our primal parents, and that
the serpent whose form he assumed was his
imp, or familiar spirit: but the theory lacks
sure corroboration, if only because the Prince
of Darkness is, on venerable authority, a gen-
tleman; and if but in this capacity, would be
the first to quote that axiomatic Place aux dames
which cynics assert to be his workaday rule.

At all events, sorcery was imputed to both
the wives of AdauL Thus the Talmudists tell
us how Lilith, his first helpmate, — ^f or the then
comparatively novel offence of refusing to obey

BEYOND LIFE

her husband, — ^was cast out of Paradise, to be
succeeded by Eve; and how since this evic-
tion Lilith, now adulterously allied with the
powers of evil, has passed her existence
"in the upper regions of the air", whence
she occasionally speeds earthward to seek
amusement in the molestation of infants.
She it is who cunningly tortures the descend-
ants of her unf orgiven husband with croup and
the pangs of teething. Sheer pedantry tempts
one to point out here that it was on this ac-
count the Hebrew mothers were accustomed,
when putting their children to sleep, to sing
^^Luttahyl'' which is when Englished "Idlith,
avaunti" so that all our cradle-songs are the
results of a childless marriage.

Equally in Jewish legend has Lilith's suc-
cessor, our joint grandmother Eve, been ac-
credited with being a trifle prone to sorcerous
practises. I regret that the details as thus
rumored are not very nicely quotable : but they
seem quite as well authenticated as any other
gossip of the period: so that witchcraft may
fairly be declared the first invention of the
first woman. Eve had dealings with the
Devil some while before the birth of Cain, even
before the incident of the fig-leaves. She was

THE WITCH-WOMAN

a magician before she was a mother^ and con-
juring with her took precedence of costume.
And while the fact that forever after there
were twenty women given to witchcraft as
against one man, may seem a little strange, King
James the First of England, in his Demonology,
explains it, speciously enough, by yet another
reference to the most ancient of all scandals.
**The reason is easy, for as that sex is frailer
than man is, so it is easier to be entrapped by
the gross snares of the Devil, as was over-well
proved by the serpent ^s beguiling deceit of Eve
at the beginning, which makes him the homelier
with that sex/' In other words, King James
is bold enough to voice it as a truism that
women go to the Devil in search of congeni-
ality.

Men have always inclined instead to sorcery.
A witch, it may be premised, derived her power
from a contract with the especial devil to whom
she became in some sort a servant: whereas a
sorcerer commanded divers spirits in bale, by
means of his skill at magic, and in this ticklish
traffic was less the servant than the master.

And the foremost of all sorcerers was prob-

BEYOND LIFE

ably Johan Faustus of Wiirtemburg. He cer-
tainly stays the best known, now that Goethe
and Gonnod and Berlioz and so many others
have had their fling at him, as an alluriAg peg
whereon to hang librettoes and allegories. But
it is Christopher Marlowe's version of the leg-
end which to-day would seem almost to justify
any conceivable practises, however diabolic,
without which we had lacked this masterwork
of loveliness. Presently I must speak of this
drama at greater length, and of Marlowe too, as
one of those neglected geniuses with which the
British branch of American literature has been
80 undeservedly favored • .

Momentarily waiviag art's debt to con-
jurers, and returning to their sister practition-
ers, the typical witch-woman was distinguish-
able — according to Gaule, in his Select Cases of
Conscience Touching Witches and Witchcraft,
— ^by "a wrinkled face, a furred brow, a hairy
lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking
voice, and a scolding tongue.'' These were the
outward marks of a sinister genus, which was
divided into three species. Thus antiquity dis-
tinguished thereamong ''white witches", who

THE WITCH-WOMAN

oould help, but not hurt; '^ black witches", who
could hurt, but not help; and ^^gray witdies",
who could do either at wilL All were persecuted
with severity, which seems natural enough in
harrying black or even gray witches, but rather
unaccountable when exercised toward the bene-
ficent white witch. It appears, however, that
the last were not without their human frailties :
Dryden at least refers to someone as being as
little honest as he could manage, and '^like
white witches mischievously good" Then, too,
a Jacobean publicist has left it on record that
'4t were a thousand times better for the land
if all witches, but especially the blessing
witch, might suffer death. For men do com-
monly hate and spit at the damnifying sorceress
as unworthy to live among them : whereas they
flee unto the other in necessity, they depend
upon her as their god, and by this means thou-
sands are carried away to their final confusion.
Death, therefore, is the just and deserved por-
tion of the good witch." Such logic smacks of
sophistry, but remoter times found it accept-
able.

Oray witches also, as has been said, were by
way of being philanthropists. Of this species
were the famed Lapland witches, from whom

BEYOND LIFE

of old the visiting sailors purchased favorable
winds. Their traffic had at worst the merit of
simplicity: the customer received a cord in
which were tied three knots ; on untying the first
arose an auspicious breeze, on loosing the sec-
ond a stronger gale, whereas meddling with the
third evoked a storm sufficient to wreck the
staunchest vesseL Pomponius Mela tells of a
company of priestesses in the Island of Sena,
off the coast of Gaul, possessed of similar power
to trouble the sea and control the winds, but
able to direct their amendments of natural laws
solely toward the benefit of such as sought their
help. And Bandulph Higden, in his Poly-
chronicon, states that the witches in the Isle
of Man dealt with the mariners of his time in
much the same manner. Before the days of
steam and electricity this traffic in wind sup-
plied international wants : and it has been pro-
fanely asserted that many of our most eminent
statesmen are over-mindful of precedent.

The Witches' Sabbat, my friend Richard
Harrowby informs me, was "traditionally a
meeting attended by all witches in satisfactory
diabolical standing, lightly attired in smears
of various magical ointments : and their vehicle
of transportation to these outings was of course

THE WITCH-WOMAN

the traditional broomstick. Good Friday night
was the favorite time for such gatherings,
which were likewise held after dusk on St
John's Eve, on Walburga's Eve, and on Hal-
lowe'en Night. The diversions were numerous :
there was feasting, with somewhat unusual
fare, and music and dancing, with the Devil
performing obligates on the pipes or a cittern,
and not infrequently preaching a burlesque
sermon. He usually attended in the form of a
monstrous goat; and — ^when not amorously JCn-
clined,— often thrashed the witches with their
own broomstipks. The more practical pursuits
of the evening included the opening of graves,
to despoil dead bodies of finger- or toe-joints,
and portions of the winding-sheet, with which
to prepare a powder that had strange uses. • •
But the less said of that, the better. Here,
also, the Devil taught his disciples how to make
and christen statues of clay or wax, so that
by roasting these effigies ^e persons whose
names they bore would be wasted away by sick-
ness."

While persecuting anyone, witches were
visible to their victims alone : and to the latter
were recommended divers methods of self-
protection. Thus conceded authorities sug-

BEYOND LIFE

gested taking the wall of the witch in a town
or street, and in rural drciunstances passing
to the right of her. In passing, one was in-
variably to clench both hands, with thmnbs
doubled beneath the fingers : and it was thought
well to salute every knownxwitch civilly before
she spoke, and on no account to accept a pres-
ent from her. To draw blood from a witch
forthwith rendered her enchantments ineffeo-
tiiaL Moreover, a horseshoe nailed to the
threshold of a door was well known to hinder
the power of any witch from entering the
house.

Persons accused of witchcraft could be proven
guilty in various ways: there was never any
popular demand for acquittal. Sometimes con-
viction was secured by finding on their bodies
certain marks, of which prudishness prevents
any description: by another process the sus-
pected woman was required— and if sorcerously
given was unable— -to repeat the Lord's Prayer.
A variant test was based on the belief that, in
the unchivalrous phrasing of King James,
^^ witches cannot shed tears, though women in
general are, like the crocodile, ready to weep
upon every light occasion." Other authorities
asserted tiiat a witch can as a matter of fact

THE WITCH-WOMAN

shed three tears, but no more, and these only
from the left eye. • . The most popular ordeal,
at all events, was that of ''swimming" the
suspected witch. By this method she was
stripped naked, and cross-bound, with the right
thumb fastened, to the left toe and the left
thumb to the right toe ; and was thus cast into
a pond or river, to choose between the alterna-
tives of drowning and thereby attesting her in-
nocence, or of struggling to keep above the
water in order to be burned as a convicted
witcL ''For it appears'' — ^again King James
is cited — ^"that God hath appointed for a super-
natural sign for the impiety of witches that the
water shall refuse to receive into her bosom
all these that have shaken off them the sacred
waters of baptism, and have wilfully refused
the benefit thereof. . .

It was long an unquestioned belief that cer-
tain persons were peculiarly endowed with the
faculty of distinguishing witches from the rest
of humanity. Of these "witch-finders" the
most celebrated was that Matthew Hopkins who
during the seventeenth century was officially
employed for this purpose by the English gov-
enunent. Hopkins was in his time a personage,
and an unexcelled detector of the "special

BEYOND LIFE

marks" which are the sure signs of a witch.
But his customary test was to ^^swim" the
accused. By this really infallible method of
furnishing public recreation he averaged sixty
murders to the year; and was thriving in his
unique profession when it somehow occurred
to someone to put Hopkins himself to Hopkins'
test. The sequel is cheering: for he impru-
dently remained above water, and being thus
by his own methods proven a witch, was burned
alive. . .

It seems a great while ago that such things
were possible. We have relinquished nowadays
our belief in witchcraft, along with our faith
in a many other Biblical matters. The faith
of every century is, however, the natural
laughing-stock of its immediate successors. So
it is now very generally conceded that witches
are obsolete, and that the cause of evil is to-day
furthered by more competent factors, such as
denying the ballot to women, or not restricting
alcohol as a poison to the communion-table,
or whatever other prevalent arrangement espe-
cially evokes the speaker's natural talents for
being irrational

THE WITCH-WOMAN

Yet consideration snggests that many witches
have a more plausible title to existence than
falls to most of their deriders. Were it but for
the noble aid which certain sorceresses have
rendered to romance, it must be that some-
where, or east of the sun or west of the moon,
there is a Paradise of Witches, wherein all these
abide eternally. There stands the house of
Pamphile, whom Lucius saw transformed into
an owl, and by whose pilfered unguents he him-
self was disastrously converted into an ass.
In the moonlit court-yard glitters an ever-
moving wheel, barley and laurel bum together
there, and Sim^tha calls to the bright and
terrible lady of heaven for pity and help and
vengeance. Near-by a nameless red-haired
witch waits at the vine-hung opening of a cave :
in her hand is a spray of blossoming hemlock:
and she cries, *^What dye lackt It has a
price.'' By the road-side, on the marge of a
clear pool a woman smiles to think of that
which she alone foresees, with bright wild eyes
that are as changeless as the eyes of a serpent:
for this is Lamia; and Lycius has already left
Corinth. On the adjoining heath the three
Weird Sisters stir their cauldron: they are
observed, from a respectful distance, by that

BEYOND LIFE

Madge Gray who once rifled the rectory larder
at Tappington, and by that wee Nannie,
''Gntty-Sark'', who in the daUce at Kirk-
Alloway extorted injudicious applause from
Tarn O'Shanter. Off shore Parthenope and
lageia and Leucosia, the dreaded Sirens,
chaunt their endless song: fathoms beneath
them that other sea-witch, with whom the little
noiermaid trafficked, lurks in a horrible forest
of polypi, and caresses meditatively a fat drab-
colored water-snake. Through yonder glen
whirls the blasphemous carnival of Walpurgis,
no more sedate to-night than when Faustus
spied upon it very aiiciently. Beyond those
dense thickets one may yet come to the many-
columned palace, builded of polished stones,
wherein Circe waits the coming of unwary
mariners, — Circe, the fair-haired and delicate-
voiced witch, who is a bane to men, and yet
sometimes takes mortal lovers. • .

But here we enter dreamland. Thus far a
little pedantic levity has seemed permissible
enough, in treating of man's dealings with the
witch-woman as his conscience prompted, since
here as elsewhere a high moral motive has been

THE WITCH-WOMAN

the banner flown by such enormitieB as grow
unbearable when regarded seriously. But the
dreams of man arise from deeper requirements
than prompt his deeds. In dreams man has
shown no aversion to the witch-woman^ whom
in his dreams he has never really confounded
with those broomstick-ridingy squint-eyed and
gobber-toothed wives of the Ooat that were con*
sdentiously hunted down and murdered; but,
to the contrary, man has always dung, with
curious tenadty, to the notion of some day
attaining the good graces of that fair-haired
and delicate-voiced witch who is a bane to men,
and yet sometimes takes mortal lovers. The
aspiration was familiar even in Plutarch's far-
off heyday: and you will find that h^, precise
fellow, though speaking guardedly enough of
''those very ancient fables which the Phrygians
have received and still recount of Attis, the
Bithynians of Herodotus, and the Arcadians
of Endymion", yet ventures into diffident and
delicate dissent from certain tenets of the ''wise
Egyptians". . .

Always people have whispered of heroes,
strangely favored, that have won, through ob-
scure by-paths, to the witch-woman's embraces,
and by her shrewd counsel have been enabled

BEYOND LIFE

to excel in earthly afifairs. The rumor is ubi-
quitous. Greek Odysseus, doubly fortunate,
was thus ambiguously cherished both by Circe
and by Calypso; Roman Numa Pompilius, by
the Arician nymph Egeria; Cossack Ivan by the
Sun's Sister, Scandinavian Helgi Thorirson by
Injiborg, and Irish Oisin by golden-haired
Niamh, and Scottish Thomas of Ercildoune
by the Queen of Faery: as was the French
Ogier le Danois by King Arthur's elfin sister,
in her hushed island realm of Avalon, and
the German Tannhauser by the furtive Aphro-
dite of Thuringia, in the corridors of her hollow
mountain. Then there is hardly an ancient
family which does not trace from Dame Melu-
sine (who founded the proud house of Lusi-
gan), as well as from that more pestiferous
witch-wife who was so disastrously won very
long ago by Foulques Plantagenet. To all sudi
legends the Bosicrucians, in particular, afiixed
a perturbing commentary. . .

In every land men have thus reported, not
very gallantly, that a possible reward for sur-
passing the run of men in wit and strength and
daring was to obtain in marriage a creature
indescribably more fine and wise than a woman.
Everywhere men have hungered for the witch-

THE WITCH-WOMAN

woman who mysteriously abides, as did Circe
and Melusine and all that whispered-of soror-
ity, in a secluded land which is always less glar-
ingly lighted than our workaday world shows
at noontide; who is as much more shrewd as
more lovely than the daughters of men; to
whom all human concernments with good and
evil are negligible matters, viewed much as men
themselves in going about a barnyard are
moved to regard the bravery and maternal de-
votion and thievery and incest of their fowls;
and whose caresses — ^this above all, — awaken no
satiety. . • And through desire of the witch-
woman many and many a man is hinted (in
those queer vague tales to which chroniclers
allude with visible circumspection, and none has
ever narrated quite explicitly) to have sacri-
ficed the kindly ties of ordinary life, aad finally
life itself. XJbiquitous is this secretive whis-
pering of the witch-woman's favors, that are
purchased by bodily and spiritual ruin, some-
times, and even so are not too dearly bought:
for everywhere is rumored thus the story of the
witch-woman, and of her ageless allure, and of
her inevitable elusion at the last of all her
lovers, whether crowned or cassocked or ink-
stained, who are but mortal. . .

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Here is no place to deal with an hypothesis
which alone would seem, quite, to explain this
race-belief. That superhuman beings, imper-
ceptible to everyday sense, at times, for their
own veiled purposes, seek union with men, and
that this union is sometimes consummated, may
appear to the majority very like moonstruidc
fustian* Meanwhile that which men vaguely
describe as ** science'' is slowly veering — ^Lf
but by means of **new'' theories concerning
a fourth dimension, curved time, curved space
and kindred speculations, — ^to the quaint find-
ing that many cast-by superstitions of the
Bosicrucians lie just ahead, and bid fair once
more to be ** discovered''. Indeed, the common-
sense, or Ptolemaic, viewpoint, which disposed
of the universe without any nonsense, by look-
ing at the earth and seeing for yourself that
it was flat, — and by watching the sun and moon
and stars visibly climbing one side of the sky
to descend the other, while you had only to
feel the ground to prove it was quite motion-
less, — ^appears to be, in one or two minor points,
not infi^Uible. And any protestation of judg-
ing all things ^^ sensibly", now that the senses

THE WITCH-WOMAN

are convicted liars, seems less a boast than a
confession.

Hypotheses apart, men believed in the witch-
woman through a need far deeper than a tepid
preference for veracity. For all men had
loved; and most of them wooed not unsuccess-
fully, at one time or another, and saw what
came of it: and they simply did not choose to
accept the result as being anything but an, ex-
ceptional and probably unique instance of some-
thing having gone wrong. With other hus-
bands, they doggedly reflected, the case was
in all likelihood quite different. . .

Against the institution of marriage has been
directed, by and large, a net amount of ad-
verse criticism such as was never attracted by
any other business arrangement Too ardent
novelists, in particular, have overdone their
contributions to the epithalamia of backbiting.
Some rousing call to take a part therein would
seem to sound as clear to the uplif tingly lach-
rymose tale-tellers, whose imaginary wives and
husbands can '^grow really to know each other''
only after the bank fails or some other material
misfortune has reduced them to poverty and

BEYOND LIFE

caresses, as to those fearless fictionists whose
heroines find it a married woman's first duty
in life to set np housekeeping with a bachelor.
Indeed, the more advanced novelists nowadays
are almost as contemptnous about marriage as
was formerly St. Paul. The considerate phil-
osopher hesitates, amid all this abuse, to con-
cede that marriage, when the contracting par-
ties are sincerely in love with each other, ends
of necessity in disappointment. But this there
appears to be no denying. For love too is a
dynamic illusion which romance induces in
order to further the labor of the demiurge, and
marriage is an estate wherein illusion quite
inevitably perishes.

You may marry through any motive less ex-
alted, from desire of money or of children or
of someone to do the darning, and have at least
a chance of attaining the prize in view. But
in love-matches there is no such chance: for,
were there nothing else, love accredits the be-
loved with opulence in qualities which human
beings display, if at all, in exiguous traces ; and
is compounded in large part of an awed rever-
ence such as it is impossible to retain for any
human being with intimacy. These phantoms
vanish at the dawn of married life: and the

THE WITCH-WOMAN

most obtuse of couples set about joint house-
holding with, as concerns each other, very few
misapprehensions outlivpig the wedding-trip;
for that by ordinary is a transmuting journey,
upon which demi-gods depart, and wherefrom
return only Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so. Now hu-
man nature, whatever cynics may assert, is
humble-minded enough to think rather poorly
of itself when manifested by its associates. In
a love-match human nature most certainly is
uplifted to the point of anticipating something
better. . . And afterward you get on fairly
well : you miss her to a decorous degree in ab-
sence, you do not verbally quarrel when to-
gether, and you even discover in the woman a
number of admirable and quite unsuspected
traits. In fact, you would as willingly part with
your right hand as part with her: but then,
when all is said, you are not in love with your
right hand, either. And you very often wonder
what has become of that other woman, whom
you thought you were marrying.

Perhaps not many of us, however, marry for
love. Love is, indeed, the one dynamic illu-
sion that rather frequently results in impotence.

BEYOND LIFE

The demiurgio spirit of romance hoodwinks
humanity through this dynamic illusion known
as love, in order that humanity may endure,
and the groans of a lover be perpetuated in the
wails of an infant; to each of us in our prime
^4t is granted to love greatly, and to know
at least one hour of pure magnanimity": yet
that hour tends for no plain reason to be ster-
ile: the madness of love-making passes like a
tinted mist; and generation after generation
casts its rice upon marriages which are
prompted by some motive other than a mutual
infatuation, and resiQt excellently. . . . For
there comes about some impediment, through
the operation of our man-made social laws, so
that, for one reason or another, where we love
to our uttermost we do not marry. And so,
we are spared the shame of seeing the highest
passion which we have known, brought to noth-
ing through the attrition of everyday life. We
are permitted to believe that with favoring
luck we might have retained forever the mag-
nanimity which youth and love once briefly
loaned; and we preserve a measure of self-
esteem. . . Even where love-marriages are
consummated, I suspect that few are prompted
by the one love of either participant's life:

THE WITCH-WOMAN

oonceming women no married man, of coarse^
would care to speak assuredly as touches this
or any other matter; but when the perturbed
bridegroom approaches the chancel he is spared
at least the fear that those delectable girls
whom at various times he has desired to meet
there may all be awaiting him. • . And so,
the husband has always a missed chance or two
to ^nbroider in reverie. . .

For in youth all men that live have been con-
verts, if but in transitory allegiance, to that
religion of the world's youth, — ^to the creed of
which I spoke just now as domnei, or woman-
worship. You may remember I promised to
come back to that: and it is in reality toward
this creed of domnei all these notions as to the
witch-woman approach. . . . Thus— as I re-
member to have read in the English version of
that Roman de Lusigna/n to which I just re-
ferred, — ^*4t was a canon of domnei, it was the
very essence of domnei, that the woman one
loves is providentially set between her lover's
apprehension and God, as the mobile and vital
image and corporeal reminder of Heaven, as a
quick symbol of beauty and holiness, of purity

BEYOND LIFE

and perfection. In her the lover views all quali-
ties of God which can be comprehended by mere-
ly human faculties. . . And instances were not
lacking in the service of domnei where worship
of the symbol developed into a religion sufficing
in itself, and became competitor with worship
of what the symbol primarily represented, —
such instances as have their analogues in the
legend of Bitter Tannhauser, or in Aucassin's
resolve in the romance to go down into hell with
^his sweet mistress whom he so much loves',
or (here perhaps most perfectly exampled) In
Amaud de Merveil's naive declaration that
whatever portion of his heart belongs to God
Heaven holds in vassalage to Adelaide de
Beziers''. . .

So it used to be, you may retort with a com-
miserating shrug. Yet even now this once
dynamic illusion of chivalrous love quite inevi-
tably invades the life of every adolescent boy,
and works transient havoc; but is by ordinary
so restrained and thwarted by our man-made
social laws as to be evicted without leaving any
lasting monuments of the tyrant's stay, in ma-
terial form. The boy's beliefs, though, are
not always left conformable to his estate. For
at this time romance tricks each of us so cun-

THE WITCH-WOMAN

ningly, in conscienceless endeavor that the man
be brought^ somehow and anyhow, to the maid's
bedy that we are persuaded what romance then
promises, in the role of Pandarus, can really
be come by: and so firm-set is the impression
that with some of us it remains ineffaceable,
even by marriage. The average male, of course,
is very rarely at pains to ascertain his private
belief in this or any other matter, and is con-
tent to assume he thinks and feels what seems
expected of him : but here and there a man pries
curiously into his own mind. And it is he who
presently becomes the veritable ** witch-
finder", after a fashion unknown to Matthew
Hopkins. . .

For suchran-one the mother of his children,
that rather likable well-meaning creature,
proves assuredly to be not at all the person
for whom, so long ago, his heart was set a-
burning: and for that very reason her short-
comings can never dim the fire, since with its
thin and vaulting ardors she is in no wise con-
cerned. So it glows fed with hope and memory.
For such-an-one the maid waits somewhere of
whose embraces one can never tire, as in an
unforgotten vision was once revealed to him,
once for all time. Meanwhile, in moiling

BEYOND LIFE

throngh a world of blnnderB, he does but break
the journey where there is tolerable company,
a deal of kindly human give-and-take, and no
rapture. If but in honor, his heart stays bound
to his first and only real love, that woman of
whom one never tires. Her coming is not yet.
He can but wait sustained by his sure faith —
discreetly left unvoiced, — ^that some day her
glory will be apparent, and he will enter gladly
into her secret kingdom, and will find her
kisses all that in youth he foreknew to be not
impossible. . . And meanwhile this prescience,
somehow, informs all art, just as life animates
the body, and makes art to him a vital thing.
For here and there art's masterworks become
precursors of the witch-woman's advent, and
whisper of a loveliness, as yet withheld, which
"never waxes old", — of a loveliness which
stays as yet the nebulous goal of art's surmise,
but will be obvious at the witch-woman's com-
ing, incarnate in soft flesh; and will be no
longer impalpable as in verse, nor inarticulate
as in music, nor cataleptic as in painting. Of
this it is alone that art whispers to the veritable
"witch-finder," to the witch-woman's nympho-
lept. And there seems to be no beauty in the
world save those stray hints of her, whose ulti-

THE WITCH>WOMAN

mate revealment is not yet . . And it is very
often through desire to express his faith in
this withheld perfection, of which he has been
conscious in broken glimpses from afar, that
he himself turns artist, and the dynamic illusion
finds secondary employment. For every art is
a confession of faith in that which is not
yet. . . Meanwhile the nympholept must wait,
contentedly enough, and share whatever hap-
pens in four-square co-partnership with another
woman, unaccoimtably ^'married'' to him, and
must know at bottom that his dealings with this
other woman are temporary makeshifts. Nor
with him can there be any doubt that Methu-
selah—who was a married man,— died in this
faith.

For there is that in every human being
which demands communion with something
more fine and potent than itself. Perhap^i in-
deed, this is only another way of saying every
man is innately religious. . . So it befalls that
to-day, as did a many in times overpast, a few
of us yet dream of the witch-woman, and of
our meeting by and bye. . . Meanwhile it may
be that wives here and there have likewise their
disillusions and a proper sense of their own
merits. How else is one to account for the

BEYOND LIFE

legends of Danae and Creusa and all those other
minxes who find no husband worthy of them
until a god had come down out of heaven, no
lessT

IV
THE ECONOMIST

— Kaep mii» kMp wh, or die yoa an Uown iq^ jva
•M diniMmberadi BaJ^h: keep oat^ for I am about a
roaring piece of work.

—Come, what doet thoa with that aame bodkt . • •
Oa&'et thou eonjore with itt

—I ean do all things eaaUy with it: llret) I ean mako
thee dnmk with ippoenui at any tabern in Europe; thatTa
one of my eonjoring worki.

— Oor Maater Parson saya tiiatPa nothing. • . •

[Bnter MsnasTaPHJUB, who seU 9qMM ai tMr
hadf9; and iken esmiat.]

'^Tk$ Tragical Hiaiory ofJh. Imaiaa

Which Admires the Economist

ALL the legends I have mentionedt how-
ever, were in large part the figments of
poets, so that no donbt they have been
misinterpreted For the visionary matter-of-
fact people who role the world have from the
beginning misapprehended eaoh and every
matter connected with those chillingly astute
persons, the poets. . . It was the penetrative
common-sense of poets, as not very generally
recognized, that I had in mind a few minntes
ago, when I spoke of Christopher Marlowe, and
referred to the Famstua as justifying any con-
ceivable practises without which we had lacked
this drama. You appeared at the time to think
that a rather sweeping statement, but there la
no question as to its truth. And in order to
make this truth quite plain to you, I shall for a
moment divert your attention to Christopher
Marlowe, as a specific instance of what I have
in mind as to another dynamic illusion. • . .

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I select Marlowe as my text, from among a
host of names which would serve my purpose,
because Marlowe, I imagine, is to you, as
through our criminal folly he is to most of us,
but one of the poets in the English Literature
course at college ; and ranks now with chapel at-
tendance and Greek particles and other happily
outgrown annoyances. Improvident and waste-
ful as this is in us, I hardly wonder. No poet
has been more worthily praised by more compe-
tent persons: but, for all that, Marlowe re-
mains unappreciated, on account of our general
human habit of appraising everything from ir-
relevant standpoints. Thus people think of
Marlowe simply as a poet, whereas his real dar-
ing, like that of all the elect among creative
writers, was displayed as an economist. And it
IS the economy of such poets that I must pause
to explain.

Now most of the phrases which we utilize as
substitutes for ideas were coined by those short-
sighted persons who somehow confound econ-
omy with monetary matters: and among these
from time immemorial it has been the custom
to encourage the shiftless cult of mediocrity.
86

THE ECONOMIST

Age-honored precepts and all reputable pro-
verbs concur in stating that a staid and con-
ventional course of life should be pursued,
upon the indisputable ground that this is the
surest avenue to a sufficiency of creature com-
forts: and, indeed, if men had ever taken the
corporeal circumstances of their existence very
seriously people would long ago have become
as indistinguishable from one another as cheese-
mites. Since Attica was young the '^middle
road" has been conmiended by sages and
schoolmasters, by vestrymen and grandparents
and bankers, and all the other really responsible
constituents of society: and yet, as I need
hardly point out, it has been the deviators from
the highway, the strayers in by-paths and even
in posted woodlands, whom men, led by instinc-
tive wisdom, have elected to commemorate. To
venture just such a mjrthological allusion as
nowadays infuriates the reader, Clio with fem-
inine perversity has insisted on singing the
praises of those who have flown in the face of
convention, and have notoriously violated every
rule for securing an epitaph in which they
might take reasonable pride. . . But no form
of greatness is appreciable save in perspective.
If your house be builded upon the side of a

BEYOND LIFE

moTmtain yon most leave home in order to dis-
cover the mountain's actoal contour: and to a
many contemporaries Homer Could not but
seem a beggarly street-door singer, and Jeanne
Dare an ill-mamiered trollop with not at all am-
biguous reasons for consorting with lewd sol-
diers. Genius, like Niagara, is thus most
majestic from a distance: and indeed, if the
flights of genius are immeasurable, its descents
are equally fathomless.

This would appear particularly true of that
creative literary genius whereby the human
brain is perverted to uses for which, as first
planned against arboreal requirements, it was
perhaps not especially designed. At all events,
very few of our time-honored authors were
esteemed as ornaments of the drawing-room,
however bravely they now figure in the library;
but were by the more solid element of society
quite generally avoided as loose fish, on the
probably Milesian analogue of their preference
of other beverages to water. For, whatever
one might desire the case to have been, there
is really no doubt that in the production of an
astoundingly large number of literary master-
works alcohol played the midwife. Equally, at
first sight, the only possible way for any repu*^

THE ECONOMIST

table connoisseur of art to confront this un-
pleasant truth was to deny its existence: and
the expedient has been adopted in pedagogic
circles with pleasing unanimity. The rest of
us are well content to take our poets as we find
them: and have no call to explain the origin
of '^ unsubstantiated traditions" as to Shakes-
pearCy and ** calumnies of Griswold*' concern-
ing Foe, and ^^ Bacchic myths" about j^Qschylos,
and *Hhe symbolic vine" of Omar, nor other-
wise laboriously to cull from the sands of time
a little dust to throw in our own eyes.

Marlowe, however, quite incontestably wasted
health and repute, and even lost his life, in the
pursuit of pot-house dissipation. It is unfair
that, after following the onerous routine fa-
miliar to every student of poetic biography,
Marlowe should be accorded no very general
consideration as an economist. . . Of course
few poets have escaped the charge of writing
by virtue of ** inspiration": and minor rhyme-
sters, naturally enough, have fostered this bal-
derdash, in extenuation of what they would be
thought to have published under the influence
of disease. But it is really too much that

BEYOND LIFE

Christopher Marlowe should be regarded as a
dissolute wastrel afflicted with rhetorical epil-
epsy, during fits of which he wrote his Hero
and Leander and his Fawtus. Even his unde-
niable achievements are insidiously belittled
when he is accredited with starting various
hares which Shakespeare and Goethe and divers
other better-winded bards ran down, — or,
somewhat to jumble similes, with being the
crude ore from which they extracted more or
less metal, to be cast by them into enduring
, forms. Such belittlement is insidious, be it re-
peated, because this idea possesses, by ill luck,
the one misleading grain of truth with which it
is so difficult to deal quite justly. For it is in-
disputable that great poets have borrowed with
a high hand from Marlowe, and — ^with an
adroitness hereabouts distinctive of great
poets, — ^have looked to it that where they pil-
fered they improved. It is equally indisputable
that Christopher Marlowe was one of the su-
preme artists of literature.

He was an artist who labored, with sincere
and appreciative reverence for his labor's
worthiness, in the very highest fields of crea-
tive writing. And it is really an inconsider-
able matter that his dramas are failures in that

THE ECONOMIST

they patently do not attain to the original con-
ception. The shortcoming is bred, not by in-
ferior workmanship, for in technique Marlowe
excelled, but by the reach of his conception,
which in cold earnest was snperhnman. And
finally, Marlowe himself has answered this
criticism, once for all, in Tamburlaine's superb
rhapsody beginning // aU the pens that ever
poets ^eM,— which I forbear to quote, because
for your esthetic enrichment it is preferable
that you search out and read these thirteen
lines with painstaking consideration. For thus
you will come by sure knowledge of what
^'poetry" actually is, and must remain
always. . . Indeed, as you may with profit
remember, the conclusive verdict as to this
tirade has been rendered by an attestedly com-
petent judge; ''In the most glorious verses now
fashioned by a poet to express with subtle and
final truth the supreme limit of his art, Mar-
lowe has summed up all that can be said or
thought on the office and the object, the means
and the end, of this highest form of spiritual
ambition." And Swinburne, for once, really
appears to speak with moderation.

But I intend both here and hereafter to avoid
that dreary thing called literary criticism, and

BEYOND LIFE

make no effort to define the faults and merits
of the various writers to whom I may allude.
I shall not analyze, compare or appraise any
of them. Instead, I shall but educe them as
illustrations of my theory as to the working-
code of romance, and shall consider them from
that sole viewpoint So, in deliberating the
economy of Marlowe, it is eminently necessary
here to emphasize the fact that his fine genius
was exercised worthily. It is not unreasonable,
indeed, to assert that he has had no equal any-
where. To consider — ^as after any such state-
ment seems unavoidable — ^the possibility that,
had Marlowe lived to attain maturity, he might
to-day have been as tritely gabbled about as
Shakespeare, is rather on a plane with debating
''what song the Sirens sang" or the kindred
mystery of what becomes of political issues
after election. Marlowe, precisely by virtue of
his more sensitive genius, was predestinate to
an early death. In so far as any comparison
can be carried, the advantage is, of course, with
Marlowe. He was a scant two months older
than Shakespeare; and all his wizardry was
ended before the young fellow from Stratford
had achieved anything notable. The highest
aim of Shakespeare during Marlowe's lifetime

THE ECONOMIST

was to poetize, as exactly as was humanly pos-
sible, in Marlowe's manner. It was by observ-
ing Marlowe that Shakespeare finally learned
how to write: and Milton **formed himself'*
on the same modeL Marlowe himself had no
instrmctors, and no need of any.

To the other side, he displayed little of
that gift for voicing platitudes in unforgettable
terms, by virtue of which Shakespeare ''comes
home" to most of us, and still remains so uni-
versally quoted. Marlowe's utterance is lack-
ing in that element of triteness without which
no work of art can ever be of general appeal
in a world of mostly mediocre people. Then,
too, one shudders to consider what Marlowe
would have made of Mercutio or Falstaff, for,
pace Swinburne, Marlowe was really not the
foremost of English humorists. To the con-
trary, his plays are larded with quite dreadful
scenes in prose, of which the only humorous fea-
ture nowadays seems to lurk in the fact that
they were intended to be amusing. In the act-
ing, there is no doubt that such rough-and-
tumble fun found appreciative audience, just as
it does to-day in the athletic comedy of our Sun-
day newspaper cartoons, and in the screened
endeavors of our most popular moving-picture

BEYOND LIFE

actors, who to the delight of crowded anditori-
ninfi throw costard pies and fall down several
flights of stairs. . . Nor may one fairly raise
any question of art, this way or the other:
Elizabethan dramatists labored under the
necessity of making the audience laugh at cer-
tain intervals, and being unable to write com-
edy, Marlowe fulfilled a business obligation by
concocting knockabout farce.

There is a deal of other calamitous printed
matter bearing his name, some of which he un-
questionably wrote, to his admirers' discom-
fort, and much of which remains gratefully
dubious. Upon these productions we need
waste no more time than did the writer. But
it here seems necessary, even at a dire risk of
appearing sophomoric, briefly to enumerate
such portions of Marlowe's work as the most
precise cannot conscientiously refuse to weigh,
as tangible achievements which now must
serve, somewhat, to counterbalance the flung-
away life of a shoe-maker's oldest son.

First of course, if though but in seniority,
comes Tamburlaine the Great: were there noth-
ing else, the ten robustious acts of this

THE ECONOMIST

astounding drama flow in a continuous stream
of resonant verse such as has no parallel in
literature, anywhere. And there is a great deal
else, for the matter of the song is compact of
all outlandish splendors, — ^a pageant, or rather
a phantasmagoria, of hordes of warriors
a-gleam in armor ; of caliphs, viziers, bashaws,
viceroys, and emirs; of naked negroes; of re-
splendent kings who are a little insane under
the weight of their crowns ; of hapless emper-
ors imprisoned in curiously painted cages, and
thus drawn about what was their kingdom
yesterday, by milk-white steeds, the manes and
tails of which have very carefully been dyed
with men's blood; and of dream women lliat
are more lovely than was Pygmalion's ivory
girl. . • To me at least it is pleasing to note
that the ^'comic'' scenes of Tcmburlaine (which
ranked among its main attractions as an acting
drama) were purposely omitted by its pub-
lisher, and so have perished, because I have
always contended that there was a certain
amount of latent literary taste among pub-
lishers.

The Jew of Malta is quite as far removed
from any atmosphere which was ever breathed
by human lungs. No doubt this play is the

BEYOND LIFE

fiasco of a Titan, in that, having perfected his
conception of Barabbas, Marlowe was not able
to find him fit employment; and so, set his Jew
abont a rather profitless series of assassina-
tions and poisonings. One can bnt remember
that when Barabbas was kidnapped, stripped of
all his passionate feeling for material beauty,
and re-named Shylock, Shakespeare made no
better work of it by involving the Israelite in
silly wagers and preposterons legal qnibbles,
over a pomid of hmnan flesh. And meanwhile
throngh well-nigh every speech attributed to
Barabbas glints sometldng of the bright mal-
ignity of lightning.

Then there is the Edward the Second, which
is to some of ns an annoyingly '^ adequate''
piece of writing; more elaborately bnilded, and
more meticulously worked out, than is habitual
with the author; and yet, when all is said, con-
taining nothing pre-eminently characteristic of
Marlowe. It is a marvelous example of the
"chronicle-history" play; and in superb pass-
ages it abounds : but, as a whole— even though,
here again, Shakespeare found a deal he consid-
ered well worth Autolycean handling, — ^the
drama seems to some of us not quite unique, in
the high fashion of its fellows. For the persons

THE ECONOMISqB

who appreciate Marlowe pay him the noble
compliment of fretting over the spectacle of
his doing work which merely surpasses that of
other i>eople in degree, rather than, as else-
where, by its nature being inimitable. In short,
their illogical frame of mind is not dissimilar
to that in which we read, ^th admiring vexa-
tion, those novels of modem life that have been
'^charmingly written' ' by Mr. Maurice Hewlett.
And in that narrative poem. Hero and Lean-
der, left uncompleted at his death, Marlowe re-
vealed to Englishmen a then forgotten aspect
of Grecian art,— by harking back, not to classic
Greek ideals, but to the Greeks' fond and inti-
mate scrutiny of the material world, and to
exultance in the grateful form and color of
lovely things when viewed precisely. It is not
an ethic-ridden world he revivifies, this pleas-
ant reahn wherein beauty is the chief good of
life, and life's paramount object is assumed to
be that warfare in which women use not half
their strength. For here it is upon bodily
beauty at its perfection that Marlowe dwells,
with fascinated delight. The physical charm
of Hero, and every constituent of her loveliness
(no less than every colorful detail of Venus 's
fair church of jasper-stone, which serves as

BEYOND LIFE

appropriate framing for that loveliness), is ex-
pressed as vividly and carefully as is possible
for the pen of a master craftsman: and even
more deft, and more lovingly retouched, is the
verbal portrait of '^ amorous Leander, beautiful
and young '\ For as Marlowe here presents it,
to be '^beautiful and young*' is, not merely the
most desirable, but the unparalleled gift which
life can bestow. And really, to each of us, with
every dilapidating advance of time, the truth
in this contention becomes no less increasingly
apparent than does the necessity of concealing
it. To Marlowe's finding, at any rate, wisdom
and power and wealth and self-control are all
very well, as the toys and solaces of maturity:
but beauty in youth — ^being then at beauty's
fullness, — ^alone is postulated to be worthy, less
of desire, than of worship. And what men
' 'foolishly do call virtuous" is thus relegated
to a subsidiary position, in comparison with
beauty, not as being in itself unimportant, but
as being of no very potent value SBsthetically.
Chiefly, however, the fame of Marlowe has
been preserved by The Tragical History of Dr.
Faustw. And this is actually ** poetic justice",
for Marlowe is at his unrivaled best in rehandl-
ing the legend of the sorcerer who, in exchange

THE ECONOMIST

for his soul, leased of the devil Mephistophilis
a quarter-century tenure of superhuman pow-
ers, and at the runnrng out of his bond was
carried off alive to hell. Now it must be noted
that Marlowe thought this story as to what had
happened in Wurtemberg, not quite a hundred
years before the time at which he wrote, nar-
rated plausible and established facts. The
story told of a bargain which Marlowe believed
was capable of consummation, by such '^for-
ward wits'', at the very moment Marlowe
wrote: and he no more questioned that as a
result of this bargain Johan Faustus, after
doing certain unusual things, was carried off
alive to hell than you or I would think of deny-
ing that Napoleon, after doing certain unusual
things, was carried off alive to St. Helena. But
above all, it must be noted that the exploit
which, as attributed to Faustus, most deeply
impressed Marlowe was the evocation of Helen
of Troy, in defiance of time and death, and
any process of human reason, to be the wiz-
ard's mistress. For Marlowe believed in this
feat also : and he found the man who had per-
formed it enviable. To Marlowe — ^need I say!
— Queen Helen, that lost proud darling of old
nations whereamong she moved as a ruinous

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flamei pre-figared the witch-womaiL The apos-
trophe of Fanstns to Queen Helen, apart from
the mere loveliness of words, thns pulsates with
an emotion for there is really no expression
in human speech. In imagination the poet
for one bre^athless moment, stands — as he per-
fectly believed, you must remember, that Johan
Faustus had stood, — ^f ace to face with that ^w-
less beauty of which all poets have perturbedly
divined the existence somewhere, and whidi
life as men know it simply does not afford, nor
anywhere foresee. To Marlowe's mind, it was
for this that Faustus pawned his soul, and
drove no intolerable bargain: and the moral
which Marlowe educes, wistfully, when all is
over, is that a man must pay dearly for doing
— not what heaven disapproves of, as would
speed the orthodox tag, — ^but tiiat which
heaven nowadays does not permit . . Of course
his hero technically '^repents'', with a con-
siderable display of rhetoric; but not until his
lease of enjoyment is quite run out, and hell
is pyrotechnically a-gape: by the prosaic the
ethical value of '^ repentance" for the necessity
of discharging an ardently unpleasant debt may
be questioned. There is really no trace of re-
gret for the hellish compact until punishment

100

THE ECONOMIST

therefor impends: and then, by a stapendouB
touch of irony, Fanstns is dragged to torment
just as his parched lips pervert, to shriek his
need, in terror-stricken babblement, that
sugared and langorous verse which Ovid whis-
pered in Corinna's arms, at the summit of life's
felicity.

In short, this Christopher Marlowe was one
of the supreme artists of Hteratura • •

We may lay finger upon this much, then, as
increment, toward justifying Marlowe's econ-
omy. This much we have to set against its pur-
chase price, which at crude utmost was the
flung-away life of a shoe-maker's oldest son,
very discreditably murdered at twenty-nine.
All this, it must be remembered, was created
— ^tangibly to exist where before existed noth-
ing, — ^by a young fellow who, as went material
things, was wasting his prospects in pot-house
dii^sipation. At the birth of much of if not
all this loveliness alcohol played the midwife.
And really to make this admission need not
trouble us, even nowadays when, at the mo-
ment I speak, we have so far advanced toward
barbarism as to have adopted, with other doc-

101

BEYOND LIFE

trines of Islam, the tribal taboo, in the
form of Prohibition; and are resolnte to let
art take its chances, with the other amenities
of life, under that new regime, which so allor-
ingly promises alike to outlaw the views of
Christ concerning alcoholic beverages, and to
enable zealous Christians to turn an honest
penny by spy-work.

For, faithful in this as in all else to his ab-
stention from logic, man has never believed his
moral standards to be retro-active. We are so
constituted that we can whole-heartedly detest
from afar whatever our neighbors consider to
be undesirable, when it is a measure of miles
which removes the object of disapproval, but
not when the thing is remote by a span of years.
Of course in this there is no more display of
reason than we evince, say, in the selection of
our wives. In abstract theory, people ought
to-day to view the infamy of Heliogabalus with
at least the disfavor we reserve for our neigh-
bors' children : in practise, a knave's wickedness
becomes with time an element of romance, and
large iniquities serve as colorful relief to the
tedium of history. And it seems banal to point
out that it no longer matters ethically, to anyone
breathing, that a shoe-maker's son, rather more

102

THE ECONOMIST

than three centuries ago, made ruin of his body
through intemperance^ for the case is no longer
within the jurisdiction of morals. Our sole
concern with Marlowe nowadays is SBsthetic:
and the most strait-laced may permissibly com-
mend the Fatisttis with much of that indiffer-
ence to the author's personal ** morality'* which
renders their enjoyment of the Book of Psalms
immune to memories of the deplorable affair
with Uriah's wife.

Then there is yet another versifier, Franwis
Villon, whose doings in the flesh allure me here
toward a parenthetic and resistless illustra-
tion of what I have in mind: for, of course,
among the many morals suggested out of hand
by the terrestrial career of Villon the most per-
turbing is that depravity may, in the last quar-
ter of every other blue moon, be positively
praiseworthy. A many other notable poets
have been deplorable citizens ; hundreds of them
have come to physical and spiritual ruin
through drunkenness and debauchery: yet over
these others, even over Marlowe if you be par-
tictdarly obtuse, it is possible to pull a long
face, in at any event the class-room, and to as-

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BEYOND LIFE

Biune that their verses would have been in-
finitely better if only the misguided writers
thereof had lived a trifle more decorously.
But with Villon no such genteel evasion is per-
missible. The (hand Testament is a direct
result of its author's having been, plus genius,
a sneakthief, a pimp, and a cut-throat. From
personal experience painfully attained in the
practise of these several vocations it was that
Villon wove imperishable verses, and he could
not have come by this experience in any
other way. So we have this Testament, which
is an inseparable medley of sneers and beauty
and grief and plain nastiness (and wherein each
quality bewilderingly begets the other three),
as the reaction of a certain personality to cer-
tain experiences. We are heartily glad to have
this Testament: and upon the whole, we are
grateful to Villon for having done whatever
was necessary to produce these poems. And no
sane person would contemn the Ballade au Nom
de la Fortune, the Regrets de la Beale Heaul-
miere, and the flpitaphe, on the score that th^ir
purchase price was severally the necessity of
forcing a man of genius to occupy a jail, a
brothel and a gibbet. For again our moral
prejudices fail to traverse the corridors of time ;

104

THE ECONOMIST

and we really cannot bother at this late day to
regain the viewpoint of the Capetian police.

Jnst here, moreover, the career of Villon sug-
gests a subsidiary moral, as to the quaint and'
rather general human habit of ^' being prac-
tical'' Villon stole purses, and the constabu-
lary hunted him down, through ** practical"
motives : and it is salutary to reflect that both
these facts are to-day of equal unimportance
with all the other coeval manifestations of com-
mon-sense. Thus, for example, it was in Vil-
lon's generation that Jeanne Dare drove the
English out of France, and Louis the Eleventh
established the French monarchy in actual
power, — ^both ** practical" and, as it seemed,
really import€Uit proceedings, of the sort to
which marked prominence is accorded in the
history-books. Yet the French monarchy to-
day shares limbo with the court of Nimrod;
dozens of English armies have entered France
since the Maid's martyrdom in Bouen Square,
and not always to the displeasure of French-
men: but the emotion with which a vagabond
in 1461 regarded a loaf of bread in a bakery
window survives unchanged. Et pain ne voyent
qu'aux fenestres, he wrote: and his action in
setting down that single line has proven a more

105

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lasting and a more momentous feat than the
capture of Orleans. Then, when you consider
all the ^'practical'' persons of Villon's acqoain-
tance, — ^the bishops and lords and princes, the
lawyers and long-robed physicians, the merch-
ants and grave magistrates and other citizens
of unstained repute, who self-respectingly
went about important duties, and discharged
them with credit, — ^you cannot but marvel that
of this vast and complicated polity, which took
itself so seriously, nothing should have re-
mained vital save the waU, as of a hurt child,
that life should be so ^'horrid." For this is
all that survives to us, all that stays really
alive, of the France of Louis the Eleventh. . .
Presently I shall return to this fallacy of
^^ being practical." Meanwhile, let it be re-
peated, Villon even when he jeers does but
transmit to us the woe of an astounded and very
dirty child that life should be so ' ^ horrid. ' ' He
does not reason about it : here if anywhere was
a great poet '^delivered from thought, from the
base holiness of intellect," and Villon reasons
about nothing: but his grief is peculiarly acute,
and in the outcome contagious. It is so cruel,
he laments, that youth and vigor should be but
transient loans, and that even I should have

106

THE ECONOMIST

become as bald as a peeled tamip; so cruel
that death should be waiting like a tipstaff to
hale each of ns, even me, into the dark prison
of the grave; and so cmel that the troubling
beauty of great queens, and even the prettiness
of those adorable girls with whom I used to
frolic, should be so soon converted into a
wrinkled bag of bones. And it very cruel, too,
that because I borrowed a purseful of money
when the owner was looking elsewhere, I should
be locked in this uncomfortable dungeon; I had
to have some money. And it is perfectly pre-
posterous that, merely because I lost my temper
and knifed a rascal, who was no conceivable
loss to anybody, the sheriff should be going to
hang me on a filthy gallows, where presently
the beak of a be-draggled crow will be pecking
at my face like the needle at my old mother's
thimble. For I never really meant any harm I
. . Inshort, to Villon's finding, life, not merely
as the parish authorities order it, but as the
laws of nature constrain it too, is so ** horrid"
that the only way of rendering life endurable
is to drink as much wine as one can come by.
Besides, wine gives you such stupendous no-
tions for a ballade, and enables you to com-
prehend the importance of writing it, as you^

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BEYOND LIFE

who are so woefully uBappreciatedy who are so
soon to die^ alone can write it : and equally does
wine sustain you through the slow fine toil of
getting all the lovely words just right . .
There in little we have Villon's creed. It is
not a particularly "uplifting'' form of faith,
save in the sense that it sometimes leads toward
elevation at a rope's end: but Villon is sincere
about it, poignantly sincere : and his very real
terror and his bewilderment at the trap in
which he was bom, and his delight in all life's
colorful things, that are doubly endeared by his
keen sense of their impermanence, are unerr-
ingly communicated • • Pity and terror: this
— dare one repeat f — ^was what Aristotle de-
manded in great poetry: and this it is that
Villon gives, full measure.

And we who receive the gift, all we who
profit thus directly by the fact that Frangois
Villon was in the flesh, plus genius, a sneak-
thief, a pimp, and a cut-throat — ^why, we may
very well protest that our sole concern with
the long-dead is Aesthetic. For that is a more
comfortable course than its alternative, which
is to make confession that Villon's depravity
has proven positively praiseworthy. Yet,
either way, we have no right to dwell obtusely

108

THE BCONOMISU

upon a circuinstance which Villon himself is
reported to have disposed of, once for all: —
''Whra Paris had need of a singer Fate made
the man. To kings' courts she lifted him; to
thieves' hovels she thrust him down; and past
Lutetia's palaces and abbeys and taverns and
gutters and prisons and its very gallows — ^past
each in turn the man was dragged, that he
might make the Song of Paris. So the song
was made: and as long as Paris endures Fran-
cois VlQon will be remembered. Villon the
singer Fate fashioned as was needful: and in
this fashioning Villon the man was ruined in
body and souL And the song was worth if
To-day of course nobody anywhere deliber-
ates denying that the song was very well worth
it One may permissibly dispute what call there
was to drag Fate into the business : but there
is no possible disputing that Villon's first homi-
cide was one of the luckiest accidents in the
history of literature; and that a throng of in-
grates have failed to render any appropriate
gratitude to Dom Philippe Sermaise, for allow-
ing himself to be MUed so easily, by a novice
in misdemeanor. . .

Our sole concern with the long dead (we are

109

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thus driven to concede) is sBsthetic: and it was
SBsthetically that Villon and Marlowe, in com-
mon with a host of conf r^res, have demon-
strated their talent for economy. . • To a
few of us it must always remain a source of in-
termittent regret that we have no medium of
expression save the one human body which we
to some extent, if only for a while, control If
you will quite rationally consider a looking-glass
you will get food for illimitable wonder in the
thought that the peering animal you find there,
to all other persons, represents you: and prob-
ably there is nobody but has been shocked to
identify one of those ambulatory reflections of
queer people, in the mirror of a shop-window,
as himself. That moving carcass does but very
inadequately symbolize yoU| who, as a matter
of open Sabbatical report, are a subtle and im-
mortal spirit: nor does it afford any outlet to
powers which you obscurely feel that you pos-
sess, and must perforce permit to come to noth-
ing, like starved prisoners that perish slowly.
. • The thing is rather a parody, in dubious
taste. . . So far from being you, it is not even
really under your control. Pre-flguring it as
your residence, you are immured in the garret,
where you have telephonic communication with

110

THE ECONOMIST

the rest of the house. But a house remains
quiescent : whereas this thing incredibly sprouts
lawns of hair; concocts, as no chemist can do,
ijts saliva and sweat and gastric juices, with a
host of mysterious secretions, and uses fhem
intelligently; makes and fits on a vitreous
armor for the tips of its toes and fingers;
builds up and glazes and renews its sentient
teeth; despatches, to course about its arteries,
innumerable rivulets of blood, with colonies of
living creatures voyaging thereon; and of its
own accord performs a hundred other mon-
strous activities in which you have no say. A
third of the time, indeed, this conmionwealth
which you affect to rule takes holiday, willy-
nilly, and you are strippred even of pretender-
ship by sleep. Meanwhile the thing restlessly
destroys and rebuilds Hself • There is no par-
ticle of it, in the arms and legs or anywhere,
which those hands before you have not lifted
and put into the mouth's humid cavern: nor is
there remaining to-day one atom of the body
you frequented ten years ago. For incessantly
it sloughs and renews and recasts itself, this
apparently .constaut body: so that you are
afforded neither a private nor a permanent
residence, but wander about earth like a wind-

Ill

BEYOND LIFE

whirl over a roadway, in a vortex of ever-
changing dust

And yet this body is likewise a canning and
elaborate piece of meGhanism, over which yon
possess a deal of influence, for a limited while;
and is an apparatus wherewith something
might conceivably be done. And so, those
covetons-minded persons, the creative writers —
the poets, the poietes, the ** makers'' — endeavor
with this loaned machinery to make something
permanent

Deluded people who view life sensibly-
through the misleading reports transmitted to
the brain-centres by man's gullible five senses,
— aim otherwhither and gravely weave ropes
of sand. It is they who, with a portentousness
which laughter-loving cherubs no doubt appre-
ciate, commend the ** middle road". They live
temperately, display edifying virtues, put
money in bank, rise at need to heroism and
abnegation, serve on committees, dispense a
rational benevolence in which there is in reality
something divine, discourse very wisely over
flat-topped desks, and eventually die to the
honest regret of their associates. And for such-
an-one that forthwith begins to end his achieve-
ment here. No doubt the gates of heaven fly

112

THE ECONOMIST

open, and his sturdy spirit sets about celestial
labor: but upon earth he has got of his body
no enduring increment. He has left nothing
durable to signalize his stay upon this planet.
Mementoes there may be in the shape of chil-
dren: yet the days of these children also are
numbered by no prodigal mathematician: and
since to these children — ^who were created when
his thoughts ran upon other matters, — ^he is
certain to transmit his habits, they too in turn
beget futilities. Meanwhile has the ' * practical ' '
person builded a house, it is in time torn down,
it bums, or else it crumbles : and his bungalow,
or Ms paper-mill, or his free circulating library,
fronts on the spires of Carthage and the
Temple of Solomon. Has he contrived a bene-
ficial law with Lycurgus, or a useful invention
with Alfred the Great, his race in the progress
of years outgrows employment of it. Has he
created a civilization, it passes and is at one
with Assyria and Babylon. Has he even
founded a religion, the faith he evinced by mar-
tyrdom is taken over by an organized church,
and pared down to the tenet that it is good
form to agree with your neighbors. . • But
the tale is old as to what befalls all human en-
deavors that are prompted by common-sense.

113

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'^ Consider in thy mind, for example's sake, the
times of Vespasian: consider now the times of
Trajan: and in like manner consider all other
periods, both of times and of whole nations, and
see how many men, after they had with all their
might and main intended and prosecuted some
one worldly thing or other, did drop away and
were resolved into the elements.'' And Marcus
Aurelius was in the right of it: by making any
orthodox use of your body and brain you can
get out of them only ephemeral results. For
all this code of common-sense, and this belief
in the value of doing '^practical" things, would
seem to be but another dynamic illusion,
through which romance retains the person of
average intelligence in physical employment
and, as a by-product, in an augmenting continu-
ance of creature comforts. To every dupe, of
course, romance assigns no more than a just
adequate illusion; and squanders no unneeded
cunning in contriving the deceit. So with men
it is a truism that people of great mental pow-
ers are usually deficient in conunon-sense ; for
only the normally obtuse can be deluded by any
pretence so tenuous as this of the ultimate value
of doing ^^ practical" things, and the acute
waste time less self -deceivingly.

114

THE ECONOMIST

To some few of our multifarioiiB race this
^futile body-wasting practised by kings and
presidents and political parties, by ditch-
diggers and milliners and shrewd men of busi-
ness, seems irrational The thriftier artist is
'resolved to get enduring increment of his body,
and by means of that movable carcass which
for a while he partially controls, to make some-
thing that may, with favoring luck, be perman-
ent Particularly does this incentive hearten
the craftsman in that creative literature where-
through a man perpetuates his dreams. In all
other forms of chirographic exercise, wherein
the scribe expresses his knowledge and ostens-
ible opinions, — as in history or in philosophy
or in love-letters or in novels that deal with
** vital' ' problems or in tax interrogatories, —
his writing is certain very soon to require re-
|Vision into conformity with altered conditions,
and is doomed ultimately to interest nobody.
ILi the sister arts, there needs only a glance
at the discolored canvases of Leonardo, or at
the battered Venus of the Louvre, to show that
here too time lies in wait to work disastrous
alchemy. But the dream once written down,

115

BEYOND LIFE

once snared with comely and fit words, may be
perpetuated: its creator may usurp the brain-
cells and prompt the flesh of generations bom
long after his own carnal loans are dust: and
possibly he may do this — ^here is the lure —
forever.

To authors who regard their art with actual
reverence, — ^and beyond doubt exaggerate its
possibilities as prodigally as their own, — ^this
then is the creative writer's goal: it is to bring
about this that he utilizes his human brain and
body: and it is to this end he devotes those
impermanencies. By any creative writer,
as has been said, the human brain is per-
verted to uses for which it was perhaps
not especially designed: nor is it certain that
the human body was originally planned
as a device for making *marks on paper.
Thus the serious artist, as well as the con-
tributor to those justly popular magazines
wherein the fiction is arranged, and to
every appearance written, with a view of in-
ducing people to read the advertisements, will
very often damage his fleshly allotments in
adapting them to serve his turn. And this
would be a weighty consideration to the elect
artist, who is above all else an economist, were

116

THE ECONOMIST

a man's brain or body, by any possibility of
hook or orook, and even in its present imper-
f eotion, to be retained by hint But these chat-
tels, as the elect artist alone would seem to com-
prehend, with any clarity, are but the loans of
time, who in an indeterminable while will have
need of his own. Sp always this problem con-
fronts the creative writer, as to what com-
promise is permissible between his existence
as an artist and his existence as an ephemeral
animal. And this problem has the dubious dis-
tinction of being absolutely the only question no
writer has ever settled, even to his own sat-
isfaction. • .

Nor is this alL Enduring literature, as it is
necessary once more to point out in a land
where reviewers so incessantly dogmatize as
to this or that book's 'truthfulness to life'',
does not consist of reportorial work. It is not
a transcript of human speech and gesture, it
is not even "true to life" in any four-square
sense, nor are its materials to be drawn from
the level of our normal and trivial doings.
So that writers seldom establish their desks at
street-comers, — ^which would seem the obvious
course were it really anyone's business to copy
human life,— -but to the contrary, affect libra-

117

BEYOND LIFE

riesy where they grumble over being disturbed
by human intrusion. I shall presently come
back to this vital falsity of ** being true to life/'
. • Meanwhile the elect artist voluntarily pur-
chases loneliness by a withdrawal from the
plane of common life, since only in such isola-
tion can he create. No doubt he takes with
him his memories of things observed and things
endured, which later may be utilized to lend
plausibility and corroborative detail: but, pre-
cisely as in the Book of Genesis, here too the
creator must begin in vacuo. And moreover, he
must withdraw, for literary evaluation, to an
attitude which is frankly abnormaL The view-
point of 'Hhe man in the street" is really not
the viewpoint of fine literature: their touch-
stones display very little more in common than
is shared by the standards of lineal measure and
avojrdupois weight: and for the greater part
of every day, at meals, and in our family con-
cerns, and in all relations with human beings,
each one of us is perforce ^'the man in the
streef It is thus from his own normal view-
point that the artist must withdraw. . . And
sometimes the mind goes of its own accord
into this withdrawal, and reverie abstracts the
creative writer from the ties and aspirations

118

THE ECONOMIST

of his existence as a tax-payer. Of the pleasure
he knows then one need not speak: but it is
a noble pleasure. And sometimes the mind
plays the refactory child, and clings pertina-
ciously to the belongings of workaday life: and
abstraction will not come unaided. Then it
would seem that this ruthlessly far-seeing econ-
omist induces such withdrawal by extraneous
means (as people loosely say) as a matter of
course, and by mere extension of the principle
on which he closes his library door. . . Of the
pleasure he knows then one need not speak:
but, then also, the pleasure is noble. For now
he is conscious of stupendous notions : he com-
prehends the importance of writing down these
notions as he alone can write them: and feeling
himself to be a god, with eternity held in fee, he
need not grudge the slow and comminuted labor
of getting all his lovely words just right. And
now he is for the while released from inhibitions
which compel him ordinarily to affect agree-
ment with the quaint irrationalities of ** prac-
tical *' persons. For in his sober senses, of
course, the economist dare not ever be entirely
himself, but must pretend to be, like everybody
else, admiringly respectful of bankers and
archbishops and brigadier-generals and presi-

119

BEYOND LIFE

dents, as the highliest developed forms of hu-
manity. So it is from his own double-dealing
that he induces a withdrawal; and with drugs
or alcohol unlocks the cell wherein his cowardice
ordinarily imprisons his actual self. Nor with
him does there appear to be any question of
self-sacrifice or self-injury, since, as he can per-
ceive with unmerciful clearness, a man's brain
and body are no more a part of him than is the
brandy or the opium. All are extraneous things ;
and are implements of which the economist
makes use to serve his end. So the abstraction
is induced, the dream is captured: and pres-
ently, of course, this withdrawal requires aug-
mented prompting. . . Thus the wind-whirl
passes with heightened speed, and the dust it
animated is quiet a little sooner than any in-
evitable need was. And subsequently commen-
tators are put to the trouble of exposing '^un-
substantiated traditions" and '^ calumnies of
Griswold*' and ''Bacchic myiiis" and "sym-
bolic vines", in annotated editions for the use
of class-rooms.

For to some of us this economy seems wrong.
There is no flaw in it perhaps, as a matter of

120

THE ECONOMIST

pure reason : but reasoning very often conducts
one to undesirable results, and after all has no
claim to be considered infallible. • . Drugged
by the fumes of moral indignation, we will even
protest that, inasmuch as Professor Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow was a man of irre-
proachable habits, and it was only yesterday
that the Christian Disciples' pulpit was adorned
by the Reverend Harold Bell Wright (to whom
I shall recur for admiring consideration), it
is, among other inferences, a self-evident
proposition that Shakespeare did not die as
the result of a drinking-bout. Conceivably the
syllogism is not builded of perennial brass.
But, as has been said, it seems at first sight, to
every reputable connoisseur of art, that the
only possible way to confront this unpleasant
truth is to deny its existence. We somehow
know, again led by instinctive wisdom, that it
is more salutary for us to perceive in this
mythos of the Dive Bouteille, which clings with
annoying uniformity to so many great creative
writers, simply a proof of their detractors' un-
inventiveness. . . For we admire our comer
of the planet, we prize our span of life, and
we cherish our bodies with a certain tenderness.
It is not the part of a well-balanced person^ say

121

BEYOND LIFE

we, to think of such ** economy'*, nor to ap-
praise a man's relative importance in human
life, far less in the material universe, after
any such high-flown and morbid fashion, so long
as there is the daily paper with all the local
news. So we take refuge in that dynamic illu-
sion known as common-sense; and wax saga-
cious over state elections and the children's
progress at school and the misdemeanors of the
^ cook, and other trivialities which accident
places so near the eye that they seem large:
and we care not a button that all about us
flows and gyrates unceasingly an endless and
inconceivable jumble of rotatory blazing gas
and frozen spheres and detonating comets,
wherethrough spins Earth like a frail midge.
And we decline, very emphatically, to consider
the universe as a whole — ^**to encounter Pan",
as the old Greeks phrased it, who rumored that
this thing sometimes befell a mortal, but as-
serted likewise that the man was afterward
insane. They seem to have had the root of the
matter.

Yet Pan is eternal and ubiquitous, whatever
we might prefer to have him. . . So perhaps

122

THE ECONOMIST

the creative writer will continue indefinitely to
abuse and wreck that inadequate human body
which is his sole medium of expression, in an
endeavor to compel the thing to serve his de-
sire. It may be, of course, that he also is some-
times led by instinctive wisdom, and achieves
economy with no more forethought than bees
devote to the blending of honey: even when the
case stands thus, the fact is in no way altered
that actually the creative writer, alone of man-
kind, does in a logical fashion attempt the un-
human virtue of economy. Whether consciously
or no, he labors to perpetuate something of
himself in the one sphere of which he is certain,
mid strives in the only way unbarred to create
against the last reach of futurity that which
was not anywhere before he made it He
breakef his implements with ruthless usage;
he ruins all that time will loan : meanwhile the
work goes forward, with fair promise. Yet a
little while, as he assuredly reflects, and there
will be no call for moral indignation, since it
will be his book alone that will endure. And
considering that wondrous volume, the arch-
bishops and aldermen and pedagogues and
leading philanthropists of oncoming years will
concede that it was the reputed wastrel who

123

BEYOND LIFE

played the usurer with his loaned body, and
thriftily extorted interest, while those contem-
poraries who listened to the siren voice of
common-sense were passing in limousines
toward oblivion. . . So it is that the verbal
artist and the **practicaP' person must always
pity each other: and when it comes to deciding
wldch is in reality the wastrel, there seems a
great deal to be said for both sides.

Perhaps that is a moral of no large ethical
value. But I am afraid there is nothing of the
sort in the whole sorry business. Meanwhile
you must remember that this cult of Art is very
ancient, and began in days when goddesses were
honored by human sacrifice. I think it is
Thomas A Kempis who reports that an old cus-
tom is not lightly broken.

.124

THE EBACTIONABT

125

— ^HaTe I the air Franeaiif . . . For you mnst know,
'tis as ill breeding now to speak good English as to write
good Kngliflh, good sense or a good hand^ . . . But^
Lord! that old people should be sneh fools! I wonder
how old people can be fooled so ! . . .

^The parson will 6X{k>und it to you, cousin. . . •

— ^I knew there was a mistake in't somehow . . For
the parson was mistaken, uncle, it seems, ha 1 hat hal

— ^The mistake will not be reetilled now, nephew.

-^The Qentleman Dancing Matter

126

Which Considers the

Reactionary

YBT, if an old custom be not lightly broken
in this cult of Art, it is equally a truism
that therein all customs inevitably alter,
and variability^ her6 as elsewhere, attests the
presence of vitality. . • So it happens that, at
the moment I speak, ^^the reign of the Puritan
in literature" is the target of considerable not
over-civil comment : and everywhere les, jeunea
are vociferously demanding their right to a
candid and fearless exposition of life as it actu-
ally is. Alike in smashing and in splintered
prose (which latter form they playfully list as
vers litre) f and via a pullulation of queer-look-
ing Uttle magazines, these earnest if rather
quaint young people are expounding their ^^ per-
sonal reactions '^ • . . For to obtrude some
reference to ^^the reaction" seems now as much
the badge of this movement as was in 1830
enjambement of a French Romanticist or in
1590 a far-fetched metaphor of an English
Euphist ''Ah, yes, but just what, precisely, is

127

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my reaction to thisf is considered nowadays,
I am informed^ the correct attitude toward art
and life alike, among all really earnest think-
ers, . . And the badge is happily chosen: for,
of coarse, this is but the latest form of that age-
less reaction which is bred in every generation
by unavoidable perception that its parents have
muddled matters beyond human patience. Thus
the necessary incentive remains inveterate,
leaving merely the question what is to be done
about it all, for each generation to answer with
pleasing variousness.

So, it is well enough that ** earnestness''
should have its little hour along with the uke-
lele, just as a **red-bIooded reversion to primal
instincts'' coincided in its fleet vogue with
that other parlor-game called pingpong, and in
the remote era of progressive-euchre parties
pretty much everything was ** subtle" and
**perverse" and '* fiery-colored". And really,
that a demand for liberty to talk on any and
all subjects should prove always a pleonasm
for limiting the discussion to sexual matters, is
proper enough, too, if only because it is the
natural business of young people to outdo their
elders, as touches both interest and perform-
ance, in such affairs.

128

THE BEACTIONAET

In every seriously taken pursuiti of conrsei
the influence of the Puritan augments daily:
and the enaction of laws prohibiting anything
from which light-minded persons might con-
ceivably derive enjoyment remains our real na-
tional pastime. But it seems actually a gen-
eral cesthetic movement, this ousting of the
Puritan from control of our reading-matter:
and since to the clear-seeing Puritan this read-
ing-matter does not appear a potential source
of pleasure to anybody, the movement has little
opposition* If only the experiment had not
been triei^ over and over again, one might look
forward to the outcome with an optimism less
lukewarm. But the progress of romance I take
to be a purely natural force : and in nature, as
has been strikingly observed, any number of
times, there are no straight lines. Art thus
does not always go forward, but moves in re-
current cycles, as inevitably as the planets and
tides and seasons, and all else which is naturaL
For "the continual slight novelty*' recom-
mended by Aristotle or some other old-fash-
ioned person, is the demand of universal nature,
and in consequence of art: so that, as you will
remember, St. Paul very feelingly comments
upon this craving as characteristic of the most

129

BEYOND LIFE

artistic people that ever lived, in his address
to the Athenians.

Thns it comes abont, humiliating as may
seem the concession, that what is happening
to-day in America is really not in essentials
different from what happened in England as
far back as 1660. Then too **the reign of the
Puritan in literature" was triumphantly done
away with, once for alL . . And it is to this
quaint analogue that I must for a moment
divert, as illustrating very exactly what I have
in mind. . .

In England 1660 marked a rather wide adop*
tion, toward life in general, of that attitude
which, as distinguished from the Chivalrous
view, is describably as Gallantry. I have read
that the secret of Gallantry is to accept the
pleasures of life leisurely, and its inconven-
iences with a shrug; as well as that, among
other requisites, the gallant person will always
consider the world with a smile of toleration,
and his own doings with a smile of honest
amusement, and Heaven with a smile which is
not distrustful, — ^being thoroughly persuaded

130

THE BEAOTIONABY

that God is kindlier than the genteel wonld
regard as rational

In fine, the gallant person is a well-balanced
sceptic, who comprehends that he knows very
little, and probably amonnts to somewhat less,
but has the grace to keep his temper. This as
a creed of conduct, of course, is ancient: yon
will find it illustrated certainly as far back as
in the disreputable Jurgen legends of Poic-
tesme, if indeed it was not explicitly voiced
even earlier by Horace. And precisely as in
the case of Chivalry, this too is a creed which
still retains adherents; so that even here in
Fairhaven my friends Robert Townsend and
Budolph Musgrave, to me at least, exemplify
the Gallant and the Chivalrous types, as
lingering survivals left at hopeless odds with
an era unpropitious to either. . •

If one is indeed known by the company he
keeps out of, Gallantry entered England very
ill-recommended. Those dissolute and pictur-
esque Cavaliers of the Restoration were really
no fit companions for any self-respecting atti-
tude toward life. They came swaggering into

131

BEYOND LIFE

England, swearing a many mouth-filling oaths,
and chivied Mrs. Grundy, who was then no less
much-thought-of for being not yet christened,
up and. down and out of the island, as a dowdy
harridan. She has regained her own, dei gratia,
since then: but, being feminine, she has never
forgiven those who once decreed her out of
fashion: and the schoolbooks she licenses will
smugly inform you, any day, that this was the
most ** immoral'' period in English history.

The description, like most of Mrs. Grundy's
verdicts, is sufficiently sonorous to insure its
repetition without the attachment of much par-
ticulai meaning. Indeed, for all that the famed
difficulties of getting a camel into a needle's eye
are insignificant compared with the !task of
getting an era into a sentence, almost any book
treating of the past is by ordinary a Museum
of Unnatural History, wherein one views the
bones of extinct epochs carefully wired
into artificial coherency and ticketed with an
authoritative-looking placard. Of all these
labels none is better known than the adjective
** immoral" attached to the period of the Eng-
lish Restoration. . . That, though, is because
its ** immorality" wad itself a moral which men
prefer not to face. One is told that this period

132

THE BEAOTIONABY

was indecent, and the information has a snb-
stratnm of veracity. Yet 1660 is only the cor-
ollary of 1649: and England being once wedded
to Puritanism^ the nnion, after enduring ten
years, was pretty sure to produce a Duchess
of Cleveland at the helm of state, and a
William Wycherley at the head of its literature.
It was the human ^^ reaction" to a decade of
supernal thinking.

When the king had bravely stepped out of
the window at Whitehall, a prohibitory tax was
laid on mental cakes and ale. An epidemic of
gloomy apprehensions in the guise of religion
devastated the three kingdoms, and agreed one
with another in the single tenet that since life
is short you must even affairs by wearing a
long face. Theological bickering succeeded the
struggles of civil war: and unsatiated by Wor-
cester and Marston Moor, dialecticians fought
and refought Armageddon. The beneficent
purpose of life — as a matter of public knowl-
edge — ^was to afford all men a chance of escap-
ing hell, by making earth equally unattractive.
Vice went thriftily clad in fanaticism, for piety,
or at least a vociferous impersonation thereof,
was expected of everyone. . . It was one of
those not infrequent historical instances when

.138

BEYOND LIFE

the rank and file of men have actually acquired
a noble idea, and have gone mad under the un-
accustomed stimulus, — such revolutions as
have their modem analogue in the world-wide
movement toward Prohibition, which, as I need
hardly say, has resulted in unseemly excesses
and a deplorable abuse of alcohol by our lead-
ing temperance workers. • . Never before or
since has hypocrisy, even in England, received
such disastrous encouragement. Children be-
gan life firmly impressed with the burden of
original sin, and simultaneously assumed the
responsibilities of Christianity and the first
pinafore.

It has been plausibly suggested to have been
through a not unnatural confusion that these
children, with time's advancement, were prone
to lay aside both together. No sooner is
Cromwell buried than comes treading over his
grave an uproarious train, rustling in satin,
rippling with laughter, and extravagant in
misdoing. It is the exiled ^^man Charles
Stuart**, returning at the head of a retinue
of tailors, cooks and strumpets — of panders,
priests, swashbucklers, perfumers, pickpockets,
and an entire peerage, — ^yesterday's mendi-
cants, to whom a kingdom has been given

134

THE BEACTIONABY

wherewith to amuse themselves. Ten years
of beggary and vagabondage not being
the best conceivable training for a monarch
and his advisers, it is inevitable that they per-
form queer antics. England is topsy-turvy:
sobriety is esteemed as quaintly out-of -fashion
wear as the late Queen Elizabeth's ruff or the
casque with which her predecessor affrighted
the air of Agincourt, If any offences stay un-
committed against decorum, it is merely be-
cause no one has thought of them. Certainly,
no person of quality ever remembers social re-
strictions save when considering how most
piquantly to break them. • . Lord Buckhurst
and Sir Charles Sedley, for example, gain pres-
tige as humorists by appearing in the streets
of London Adam-naked: 'tis conceded by the
wits to be a vastly diverting jest, for Gallantry
is yet in its boisterous youth. Where decorum
had stalked unchecked for years, at last the
revolution has set in, as against any other
tyrant. The Eestoration is thus far ** im-
moral'', but profoundly logicaL As for con-
demning, there is always danger in hasty
judgments : and investigation has ere now sug-
gested that Nero was throughout the victim
of his artistic temperament, and that the dog

135

BEYOND LIFE

in the manger was a neurasthenic in search of
rest and qniet • •

Questionless, if the English of the day were
somewhat lacMng in hidebound morality, they
seem to have trod the primrose way with hon-
est enjoyment, and to have anticipated in the
reputed bonfire just ahead, at the very worst,
a feu de joie. Meanwhile the air they breathed
was filled with animation, gayety, wit and ex-
citement For these people were guilty of
enjoying existence without analyses, in a period
of Externals, wherein hearts pumped blood and
had no recognized avocations. Of a gentleman
it was everywhere expected, as the requisites
of social success, to make improper advances
gracefuUy; and to dress not more than a month
behind the Court of Fontainebleau; and to
fence well enough to pink his man in an occa-
sional duel back of Montague House ; and to say
resistlessly in French that which he ought not
to say at alL

For conversation was now an art. You
adopted it as a profession, and labored assidi-
ously toward graduation as a wit. Persons of
ton who properly valued their reputations
would spend at least an hour in bed devising
impromptus while the day was being aired.

136

THE BEAOTIONABY

They omamented their language as carefully
as their bodies ; the sting of an epigram was as
important as the set of a periwig : and the aspir-
ing were at no little pains to crowd all their
envy, hatred and nncharitableness into a per-
fectly phrased sentence, while wistfully hoping
that its rounded and compact malignance might
rouse approving laughter in the coffee-houses.
. . For that was fame, albeit fame of a sort
which is hardly appreciable nowadays, when
thoughts are polished solely against potential
appearance in a book. When two or three tax-
payers are gathered together for the sake of
what we humorously describe as conversation,
it is salutary to remember that you may retain
far better repute as touches sanity after dis-
charging a shotgun into the midst of the group
than wiU survive the loosing of a ** rhetorical*'
sentence. But men were less partial to the
slipshod on flambeaux-lighted Bestoration eve-
nings, when Killigrew and Bochester capped
jests, and ornate paradoxes went boldly about
tavern-tables, secure of applause, and with no
weightier misgiving than the offchance of
clashing with some more cleverly worded as-
persion of human nature.

137

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Snoh were the beaux who loitered through
the parks by day, and at night, with congenial
female companions, thronged the side-boxes of
the theatres. They had assembled to be
amused, and in 1660 nothing in dramatic form
in England was able to bring about this con-
summation. There was only the Elizabethan
and Jacobean drama, which was to them — ^as
it remains to-day to the more honest of our
contemporaries, — ^all very admirable, no doubt,
in a remote high-minded sort of way, but with-
out any possible doubt, deplorably old-fash-
ioned. Such an audience puzzling over Hamlet,
Prince of Denmark, as revived by the Duke's
company, is a repetition of the ancient fable, —
a group of splendid, shimmering and not at all
erudite cocks gathered around a jewel, which
they find curious but tasteless. Their "reac-
tion", in fine, was plain boredom: and ''the old
plays," as Evelyn recorded after sitting
through this Hamlet, ''begin to disgust our re«
fined age. ' ' This Shakespeare, about whom their
fathers made such a to-do, had evidently been
over-rated: his tragedies were lacking in cor-
rectness, and certainly were unlike those of

138

THE BEACTIONABY

that newly disoovered genius, in France yon-
der, Jean Bacine: as for his comedies, they
were insipid things compared with those which
that really diverting rascal, Moliere, was pro-
ducing every week or two, in France, where
King Lewis himself took part in them. Thus
it was that to these people, too, came the un-
avoidable perception that their parents had
muddled sBsthetic matters beyond human pa-
tience.

So English audiences demanded new plays,
which would resemble those French dramas
that it was the very height of fashion to admire.
They wished for something they could compre-
hend: like all uncultured persons, they were
unable comfortably to venture in imagination
beyond the orbits they traveled in flesh, and so
preferred in art an exalted parody of their
own everyday existence. They were bored by
these mouthing thanes whose only assignations
were with witches in a cave, and by these out-
of-date Moors who smothered a faithless wife
instead of allowing her a separate maintain-
ance. They wished to see the stage bustling
with people whose motives and doings they
could understand and commend: so the beaux
denumded heroines who, with delicious flut-

139

BEYOND LIFE

terings, stayed chaste pending the first pro-
curable opportunity to bQ otherwise: and the
fine ladies wanted as heroes flattered likenesses
of last week^s seducer, scented and irresistible,
to parade triumphantly among the ruins of a
shattered Decalogue.

The dramatists did their best toward com-
pliance. A new style of comedy was impro-
vised, which, for la<^ of a better term, we may
agree to call the comedy of Gallantry, and
which Etherege, and Shadwell, and Davenant,
and Crowne, and Wycherley, and divers others,
labored painstakingly to perfect They prob-
ably exercised the full reach of their powers
when they hammered into grossness their too-
fine witticisms just smuggled out of France,
mixed them with additional breaches of deco-
rum, and divided the result into five acts. For
Gallantry, it must be repeated, was yet in its
crude youth. . • So these comedies, however
gaily received in those days, seem now a trifle
depressing. Such uncensored philosophy may
well have interested mankind when voiced by
the lovely painted lips of Nell Gwynne or lisped
by roguish Mrs. Eiiipp (Pepys' "merry
jade"), when the beauty of the speaker loaned
incisiveness to the phrase, and the waving of

140

THE EEACTIONAEY

her fan could suggest naughtinesses. But now,
in reading, the formal cadences of these elabo-
rate improprieties blend, somehow, into a dirge,
hollow and monotonous, over an era wherein
undue importance would seem to have attached
to concupiscence. The inhabitants can think of
nothing else : continually they express the delu-
sions of vice-commissioners and schoolboys in
regard to the matter, and are bent upon having
you believe that, behind the scenes, their am-
orous prowess puts to shame the house-fly. It
is, if you insist, rather nasty: but, above all,
it is so naive. . . And at worse these '^real-
ists'' did not pretend that their interest in such
affairs, — an interest which is probably always
more or less an obsession with the inexperi-
enced, — ^had anything to do with altruism and
the social reformation of humanity. It was
merely to make sport they trifled with the
quaintness of the still popular fallacy that hu-
man beings are monogamous animals, either by
inclination or practise. For the comedy of Gal-
lantry took its cue from the Court of Charles
the Second, where morality was strictly con-
formable to the standards of spinsters whose
inexplicable children were viewed with a pecu-
liar tenderness by the king. And these Caro-

141

BEYOND LIFE

lian arbiters — ^the Duchess of Cleveland, the
Duchess of Portsmouth, the Duchess of Bich-
mondy and other ladies of the bedchamber, —
were not duchesses of Lewis Carroll's creation,
intent on finding a moral in everything. . .
One of these dainty Iniquities had, indeed, be-
stowed considerable and even profoundly per-
sonal favors on Wycherley, in return for verses
in praise of her ancient calling: and the dram-
atist, remembering it was the Duchess of Cleve-
land who had lifted him to fame and participa-
tion in royal privileges, felt perhaps that com-
mon gratitude demanded of him a little rough
treatment of virtues any general practise of
which would involve the destitution of his bene-
factress. Whatever his motives, Wycherley
manifested scant respect for the integrity of
the Seventh Commandment, or in fact for any
sort of integrity. • •

This, of course, was very reprehensible.
Yet the plays of this William Wycherley make
rather more than interesting reading, for there
is in his wit a genuine vigor that withstands the
lapse of time and the distraction of explana-
tory notes. One may yet smile over the clever

142

THE BEACTIONABY

things said in his comedies, without being pro-r
f oundly in sympathy with the speakers. For
Wyoherley's priapeans are, when yon view
them closely, in nothing an improvement upon
actual human beings. They have forsaken
blank verse for something very like the real
speech of unusually quick-witted persons in so-
cial intercourse: and their behavior springs
from no more exalted motives than people
ordinarily bring into a drawing-room. In de-
picting character, and in his dialogue, Wycher-
ley was the first of English writers to attempt
anything like sustained '^realism": and it is
a quaint reflection that Jane Austen is his liter-
ary granddaughter.

It would be pleasant to discuss a little more
amply this William Wycherley. The spend-
thrift had virile genius, which, had he chosen,
might have made his name one of the greatest
in English literature. Instead, he preferred to
enjoy the material things of life, and, in the
end, got from his endeavor to do so, very small
comfort. . . But the man's work remains, for
anybody to inspect at will : and all that is neces-
sary to say as to the man himself has been^
rather indulgently, set forth elsewhere.

So in his first youth he wrote four comedies,

143

BEYOND LIFE

in a manner that will always delight the judi-
cious, because the desire to write perfectly was
inborn in him: but all the while he was rather
ashamed of his employment To be classed
with such queer cattle as authors, and be con-
sidered at the mercy of persons whom lack of
any especial ability has reduced to writing
criticisms for the newspapers, a little marred
his renown as a leader of fashion, and indeed
is still humiliating. Then many writers be-
sides Wycherley have sometimes felt dejectedly
that scribbling on paper is trivial employment
for an adult • • So he protests to his ad-
mirers, yawning carelessly behind his long
white fingers, that these jeiix d^ esprit were
written for his own amusement; mere trifles,
in faith, scrawled at odd moments in his boy-
hood, and hastily strung together; nothing
more, good hearts, he assures theuL And his
hearers, duly impressed, applaud this gentle-
manly rogue, who has without any effort de-
picted vividly that which they imderstand and
admire. For the age, like every other age as
a whole, is not really interested in the myster-
ies of existence that move in orbits other than
the roimd of daily life. Poetry, religion, high
passion and clear thinking even now vitji most

THE BEACTIONABY

of ns remain the x^s and y^s of a purely aca-
demic eqnationi and as unknown quantities, are
as dubiously regarded in literature as else-
where. But that which is **true to life'* any-
one of us can at once recognize, with a pleasant
glow over his own cleverness.

Now it is unnecessary to enumerate all the
points of resemblance between what may be
euphemistically described as the present state
of reading-matter in America and the very real
literary art of the English Bestoration. Nor is
it needful to explain that, where these ** real-
ists *' attempted to be as lively as their French
models, our own ** realists '* are more ambi-
tiously endeavoring to be at once as ** daring'*
and as dull as the Bussians. . . The main point
is that in both cases the reaction was inevitable
and not especially significant The similarity
next in importance is found by observing that
these Bestoration dramatists were the first
English writers to fall into that dangerous and
thrice dangerous practise with which our litera^
ture is threatened to-day, of allowing their art
to be seriously influenced by the life about
them.

145

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For Wycherley and his confreres were the
first Englishmen to depict mankind as leading
an existence with no moral outcome. It was
their sorry distinction to be the first of English
authors to present a world of nnscmpulons
persons who entertained no especial preju-
dices, one way or the other, as touched ethical
matters; to represent such, persons as being
attractive in their characteristics; and to rep-
resent such persons, not merely as going un-
punished; but as thriving in all things. There
was really never a more disastrous example of
literature's stooping to copy life.

For of course the Bestoration dramatists
were misled by facts. They observed that in
reality unscrupulous persons were very agree-
able and likable companions; that the prizes
of life fell to these unscrupulous persons ; and
that it is only the unscrupulous person who can
retain always the blessing of an imtroubled con-
science. Anyone of us can to-day observe that
such is still, and perhaps will be forever, the
case in human society. And equally, everyone
of us knows that in enduring literature of the
first class this fact has always been ignored,
and retributive justice, in the form of both
gnawing remorse and physical misfortune, has

146

THE EEACTIONAEY

with gratifying regularity requited the evil-
doer.

Most great creative writers, in the pnrsnit
of their emblematic art, have tended to present
man's nature as beiag compounded of **good''
and "evil'' qualities, — presentiug humanity in
the explicit black and white of full-dress mor-
ality, as it were, without much intrusion of the
intermediate shades of ordinary business-wear.
And all great creative writers have as a rule
rewarded the virtuous, but they have punished
the wicked iavariably. Here we touch on what
is perhaps the most important illusion that ro-
mance fosters in man.

It can hardly be questioned that "good" and
"evil" are SBsthetic conventions, of romantic
origin. The most of us, indeed, at various re-
moves, quite candidly derive our standards in
such matters from romantic art, as evinced in
that anthology of poems and apologues and
legends and pastorals and historical romances
known collectively as the Bible. And therein,
you will recall, the Saviour of mankind is rep-
resented as conveying his message by making
up short stories in the form of parables, ro-

147

BEYOND LIFE

mance thus being very tremendously indicated
as the true demiurge. • . But of the Bible I
will speak later.

And were there nothing else to indicate the
artistic origin of **good*' and **evil", no one
could fail to note that ** goodness *' everywhere
takes the form of refraining from certain
deeds. Every system of ethics, and every re-
ligion, has expressed its requirements in the
form, not of ordering people to do so-and-so,
but of ** Thou Shalt not do this or that' \ Thus
the ** wicked '' have always retained a monopoly
of terrestrial dealings, since the ^^good'' have
largely confined themselves to abstention there-
from. There is only one class of men con-
ceivable to whom avoidance of action could
figure as being in any circumstances praise-
worthy: and that, of course, is the artist class,
which alone can make use of, and indeed has
need of, physical inactivity, wherein to evolve
and perfect and embody its imaginings. To
rational persons it is at once apparent that
mere abstention from enormities cannot in
itself constitute any very striking merit; and
that rigorously keeping all the Ten Conmiand-
ments, say, cannot possibly entitle you to su-
pernal favoritism. You really cannot in reason

148

THE EEACTIONAEY

asky from either celestial or civic authorities,
a reward for not being a thief or an adulterer,
and expect to enter into eternal bliss on the
ground of having kept out of jaiL • • To the
contrary, all religious precepts, when closely
considered, can have no bearing whatever on
any future life, and would seem to be the purely
utilitarian figments of romance, as variously
contrived with a view of improving the coher-
ency and comeliness of life here.

Thus virtue has always been conceived of
as victorious resistance to one's vital desire
to do this, that or the other, and in a word as
daily abstention from being **true to life'*.
And that such abstinence will ultimately be re-
warded full measure, is the lure which religion
has always dangled before man, — ^very plainly
in the demiurgic effort to exalt the animal, and
to woo him away from '^realism". . . So he
moils forward, guided by the marsh-fire glitter
of that other venerable artistic convention **the
happy ending*'. For being "good" he wiU be
paid, here in all probability, but certainly in a
transfigured life to come. It is that dynamic
belief which men generally entitle the sustain-
ing force of religion. . . And religion, like all
the other products of romanoei is true in a far

149

BEYOND LIFE

higher sense than are the unstable conditions of
oar physical life. Indeed, the most prosaic of
materialists proclaim that we are all descended
from an insane fish, who somehow evolved the
idea that it was his duty to live on land, and
eventually suceeded in doing it. So that now
his earth-treading progeny manifest the same
illogical aspiration toward heaven, their bank-
ruptcy in common-sense may, even by material
standards, have much the same incredible re-
sult

Still, it is a pity we no longer really notice
that material world which we unthinkingly con-
temn. Much abominable talk about ^^the un-
wholesome restlessness of modem life'' is thus
bred by our blindness to the fact that restless-
ness is pre-eminently a natural trait. All nature
is restless, as men must very anciently have
noted with troubled surmise, when they ob-
served this constant and inexplicable moving of
things. . . The world they inhabited was a
place ineffably different from the planet which
we utilize as a foundation for office-buildings,
but then too the world was full of obvious un-
rest For over their heads by day moved a

150

THE BEAOTIONABY

ball of fire, and at night a spotted plate, or
perhaps a crescent, of silver, moving among
innumerable lamps that gattered and sparkled
as they too moved, each as if of its own accord.
Incomprehensible objects, much like enormous
fleeces, likewise moved overhead by day, and
moved earthward at evening, to be dipped in
blood and dyed with gold. Sometimes would
come the moving pelts of more sombre mon-
sters, bellowing with rage, and these shaggy
horrors would fight one another with terrible
javelins, while the world wept and the frenzied
trees wailed aloud. Very often after such a
battle a triumphal arch, of all blended colors,
would arise as if of its own accord, in honor
of the victor. . • And on earth plants crept
out of the soil much as did the worms, and the
grass thrust through like little green swords,
always moving. Bushes and trees, that fastidi-
ously cast by and renewed their raiment, and
insanely relinquished it altogether when the
world was chilliest, were never still, but
moved always, and whispered secrets to one
another. Water wandered about earth, and
chattered and laughed as it moved. The very
fire in your cave moved too, as though strug-
gling to free itself from the hearth, and if you

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came within reach, it venomously stung you. • •
Men long ago noted this interminable restless-
nessy this imceasing movement^ of insensate
things; and deduced, quite naturally, that in-
visible beings must exist who manipulated
them. Whether the deduction were right or
wrong, the approach to it was purely a matter
of reasoning: and man's interpretation of the
universe, through considering things as they
were, was in the terms of ** realism'*. Men saw
the universe as the uncanny place that it re-
mains to honest inspection. . •

Then appeared, as invariably appears, the
liberating reactionary. For romance, the first
and loveliest daughter of human vanity, took
charge of this interpretation, and transmuted
it, by whispering that these unseen beings were
vitally interested in mankind and in all the
doings of mankind. This, as I need hardly
point out, had nothing to do with reasoning : it
was not (upon the whole) a logical inference
based on the analogue of man's deep interest
in, say, the morals of gnats and lizards; but
was throughout the splendid and far-reaching
inspiration of romance. For now the demiurgic

152

THE EEAOTIONABY

spirit of romance revealed these beings, who had
gifts to bestow, and led men thrif tly to worship
thenL So that, by the grace of romance, the
qnite incredible ^^ reaction" of man to all the
mystery and vastness of the universe was a
high-hearted faith alike in many impendent
blessings and in his own importance.

For it was romance, the first and loveliest
daughter of human vanity, that now caused re-
ligion to become dynamic, by presenting it as
profitable to men. Straightway in Egypt hawk-
headed Ba went forth, a divine philanthropist,
to fight with the strong dragon Apap for man's
welfare: and Queen Isis, crowned with the
young moon, and attended by geese and ser-
pents, set out upon her wanderings, burying
here and there a fragment of her loved hus-
band's body, so that men might get plentiful
crops from the earth she thus made fertile.
From Nineveh came Ishtah, in a chariot drawn
by innumerable doves : she bore in one hand a
cone-shaped pebble, and in the other a comb:
thus she came mystically to reign as Mylitta
in Babylon, as Astarte in Syria, as Tanith in
Carthage, as Ashtaroth in Canaan, as Analtis
in Armenia, and as Freia in the northlands, and
everywhere to delight and madden mankind

1^9

BEYOND LIFE

with careful perversities of passion. About
India roamed Pushan, with his hair braided
spirally like a shell, and he carried a golden
spear wherewith to protect men from every ill :
and dreadful but not unpropitiable Kali, the
Contriver of Human Sorrows — ^the Black God-
dess, whose joy was in curious torture, — ^might
sometimes be encountered there, in the form
of a tigress, intent to work evil among men.
And Olympos arose, in very much the fashion
of Ilium's fabled erection, to a noise of multi-
tudinous music, and so revealed its passionate
and calm-eyed hierarchy: nymphs went about
the woods, so that in every coppice was the flash
of their silvery nakedness, and from stilled
forest pools came the green-haired Naiads : and
of all these romance consummated the nuptials,
at one time or another, with some member of
the human race, save only— by a fine truthful
touch — ^the Goddess of Wisdom. And north-
ward Thor smote terribly with his Hammer,
bringing the nourishing rain to men's tilled
places, and Balder the Ever-Beautiful, whom
blind Hoder slew unwittingly with a javelin of
misUetoe-wood, went down into Hela's cheer-
less habitation, there to abide until the gather-
ing of Bagnarok; so that virtuous persons

154

THE BEACTIONAEX

might then pass through the world's twilight,
over the bright rainbow bridge, to revel etern-
ally in Gimli, that paradise which the j^sir had
builded for wise and valiant men. Everywhere,
as romance evolved the colorful myths of re-
ligion, the main concern of the gods was, less
with their own affairs, than with the doings of
men: everywhere religion was directly profit-
able to men: and everywhere romance loaned to
this new form of expression that peculiar
beauty— which is delicate and strange, yet in
large part thrills the observer by reason of its
unexpected aptness, — such as always stamps
the authentic work of romance.

Then the demiurge set about a masterpiece,
and Christianity was revealed to men* . .
There is really no product of romance more de-
lightful than the Bible: but we are prone to
appraise it, like everything else, from irrele-
vant standpoints. Thus we consider the Book
piecemeal: we think of Abraham and Moses and
David and Isaiah and Paul and Peter and so
on, as individuals, and attempt, with some-
thing very like aesthetic sacrilege, to educe
^Uessons'' from their several lives. To do this

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BEYOND LIFE

is beyond any reasonable doubt a futile pro-
ceeding, and is to misapprehend the Author's
scale. For the proportion of any one of these
people to the story is not, as elsewhere, the
relation of a character to the tale in which it
figures, but rather the value of a word, or at
most a sentence, that is employed in narrating
the romance. In this great love-story there are
only the two characters of God and Humanity.
The men and women used as arbitrary symbols
in themselves signify very little. But viewed
collectively, like so many letters on a printed
page, they reveal a meaning, and it is
gigantic. . .

For I spoke just now of the Cinderella
legend, with its teaching of the inevitable very
public triumph of the neglected and down-
trodden, as being the masterwork of romance.
Can you not see that the story of Christ, the
climax toward which the whole Bible-romance
moves as its denouement, is but the story of
Cinderella set forth in more impressive terms!
— for therein the most neglected and down-
trodden of humanity is revealed, not as a tin-
seled princess, but as the Creator and Master
of all things: and His very public triumph is
celebrated among the acclcunationy not of any

156

THE EBACTIONABY

human grandees and earls and lackeys, but of
the radiant hosts of Heaven* And you must
note the scale of this greater version! For as
the disregard and contumely accorded God is
dated from the Genesis of humanity, from the
primal begiimings of life, so is the ultimate
very public triumph celebrated amid the unim-
aginable pomp and fanfare of the vision seen
from Patmos. And then the firmament is rolled
up like a scroll that has been read to the end,
and the last type of life is removed from earth,
precisely as all type is removed from a **form''
after the manufacture of a very beautiful book
that is not intended as an article of commerce,
but is printed solely for the Author's
pleasure. . .

I spoke of Christianity as a product of ro-
mance. . . I have discoursed to little purpose
if that sounded to you like a slur upon Christi-
anity: for from the beginning I have been con-
tending that nothing in the universe is of im-
portance, or is authentic to any serious sense,
except the various illusions of romance, the
demiurge. And I am frank to confess that I
elect to believe every word of the Bible. In-
deed, to discover anything incredible therein
necessitates a rather highly developed form of

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opththalinia in regard to what is miraculous.
It is possible only to those persons who some-
how overlook the fact that they themselves are
miracles of dullness entirely surroonded by
miracles of romance. We should avoid such
beings. Personally, I find no difficulty in be-
lievingy for example, that Jonah was kept alive
for three days in the commodious interior of
a great fish, when I consider that I myself have
been kept alive for a number of years impris-
oned in three pounds of fibrous matter here
in my skull. That Adam was modeled of clay,
and an immortal spirit breathed thereinto, is in
every way a more comprehensible and neat pro-
ceeding than that the physical union of two hu-
man bodies — a process in which the soul would
seem very certainly to take no part whatever, —
should not infrequently produce an infant who
is an immortal spirit And finally, that Christ
turned water into wine, of noticeably superior
and heady quality, and gave it to His friends
to drink, is at the worst as consistent with
reason as that His most vociferous servitors
should demand to have any imitation of His
example rewarded with a jail-sentence. . . Ah,
no, there is no difficulty in the miracles and in-
consistencies of the Bible, for us who live

158

THE BEACTIONAEY

among, and are made what we are, by miracles
and inconsistencies.

Thnsl am frank to confess that I elect to be-
lieve every word of the Bible. Its historical
portions, I am told, have been shown to be un-
true, but that is surely a very inadequate reason
for exchanging belief in them for credence of
the artless '^facts'' which '^scholars'' propose
as substitutes* For as I have previously pointed
out, our sole concern with the long-dead is sbs-
thetic. Now ssthetically it makes for tedium
to enthrone any such dull figure as the ^^histor-
ical ' ' Pilgrim-Father-sounding Nebo-def end-
the-crown in place of the picturesque potentate
who ate grass like an ox, and certainly it makes
for dryness to revise the world-engulfing Flood
into a local freshet; whereas the Christ legend
should always be believed in, without relation to
the ^^ realism'' of inscriptions and codexes, be-
cause of the legend's beauty and usefulness to
art. • . But suppose these things never hap-
penedf Why, but do you not see that to sup-
pose anything of the sort is insane extrava-
gance f — ^for it is to barter a lovely idea for a
colorless one. No, whether the Bible-story be
* 'historical" or not, the story is priceless either

159

BEYOND LIFE

way, as a triumph of romantic art, in its apothe-
osis of the Cinderella legend.

So I spoke of Christianity as a product of
romance, and as the masterpiece of romance.
And such it veritably is : for if scribes who were
not ^'divinely inspired" concocted and ar-
ranged the Bible as we have it, the Bible is past
doubt Ihe boldest and most splendid example
of pure romance contrived by human ingenuity.
But if it all really happened, — ^if one great
Author did in point of fact shape the tale thus,
employing men and women in the place of
printed words, — ^it very overwhelmingly proves
that our world is swayed by a Bomancer of in-
calculable skill and imagination. And that the
truth is this, precisely, is — ^again precisely, —
what I have been contending from the start

160

VI
THE CANDLE

161

—Mr. SeaadAli for Hflftvoi's saks^ dr, trj if jon eaa
diimade him from taming poet.

^Poetl . . . Why, what the devil I has not your
poverty made 70a enemies enough f must you needs show
your wit to get moref

— ^Ay, more indeed: for who cares for anybody that
has more wit than himself f

— Jeremy speaks like an oracle. . • • Ko, turn pimp,
flatterer^ quack, lawyer, parson, be chaplain to an atheist^
or stallion to an old woman, anything but poet; for a
poet is worse, more servile, timorous and fawning, than
any I have named.

— £o9e fcf Love

lfi2

Which Values the Candle

WE have oome a long way, from the petty
yillains of Wycherley to the eternal
verities of religion* . . And in prog-
ress we seem to have deserted the Gallant atti-
tude toward lif e, at a period when among Eng-
lish-speaking peoples this school of philosophy
was yet in its boisterous youth. It matured, as
I need hardly say, into something infinitely
more urbane; and developed, as does every in-
spiration of the demiurge, in a direction very
largely determined by the material this artist
had just then in hand. Precisely as the sculp-
tor's inspiration must conform to his supply of
marble, so must romance be trammeled by
working in the rarer and more stubborn me-
dium of human intelligence.

Indeed, it is pitiable to observe how the most
felicitoub notions of the demiurge, when
brought forcibly into contact with our gen-
eral blockheadedness, fly off a tangent. Thus,

163

BEYOND LIFE

for instanoe, it has long fared with Ghria-
tianity, which I made bold to etdogize a
moment ago as the supreme mtasterpiece of
romance, however many well-meaning persons
stand, to-day as always, ready to assure you
that we have been very dismidly privileged to
witness **the world-wide failure of Christian-
ity." Well, that is another verdict which will
be settled by posterity, without, it is just con-
ceivable, any prolonged consideration of my
opinion. Meanwhile it is true that those few
of us who believe that the principles of Christi-
anity may perhaps some day be regarded seri-
ously as rules of conduct *are apt every once
in a while to be staggered. A war, for example,
may seem, to persons judging hastily, to render
any such opinion untenable. Yet, when rightly
viewed, the war-madness which is occasionally
kindled to ravage Christendom, discredits noth-
ing except the harmless pretensions of us
church-members to be otherwise than academ-
ically interested in Christianity. The verity
and beauty and the importance of Christianity
remain unaffected, alike by the doings of lay-
men and clergy.

For of course the time-hallowed verdict of
the clergy, when confronted by this mania, has

164

THE CANDLE

been perfectly voiced by an honored and m-
fluential prelate: ''All God's teachings about
forgiveness should be rescinded for the enemy.
I am willing to forgive our enemies for their
atrocities just as soon as they are all shot. If
you would give me happiness, just give me the
sight of the leaders of the enemy hanging by
the rope. If we forgive our enemies after the
war, I shall think the whole universe has gone
wrong.''

Now that is pithily put: it leaves you in no
manner of doubt as to the speaker's opinion of
romantic Galilean doctrines, and candor is
always worthy of commendation. And the
clergy in every era have merited the praise due
to this fearless stand. History must always
record that in war-time the ministers of Christ,
in every land and epoch, have bravely confessed
that to their minds the exhortation to love your
neighbor was in no way inconsistent with mili-
tary endeavor to remove him from the face of
the earth; and that to their minds the text
concerning the blessedness of peacemakers
should be ''rescinded for the enemy." The
clergy act bravely, be it repeated, for consider-
able courage is required to make public con-
fession that your mind works in this fashion.

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BEYOND LIFE

Nor for near twenty centuries have they once
faltered in contending that the Sixth Com-
mandment should be interpreted in a super-
Pickwickian sense, since if only you were care-
ful to commit your homicides wholesale and in
the right uniform, manslaughter was an emi-
nently praiseworthy pursuit. Any killing done
in the wrong uniform, of course, is counted as
another brutal atrocity: that has always been
frankly conceded by the clergy, upon both
sides. . . For everywhere in war-time the
clergy are thrust into the delicate position of
having to explain away explicit requirements
with which their parishioners do not intend to
be bothered just now : so that the clergy labor
under what must be the very unpleasant obliga-
tion of talking truculent nonsense Sunday after
Sunday, and of issuing a formal invitation to
Omnipotence to take part in the carnage. How-
ever, the considerate person will always re-
member that rectors and bishops really have
no alternative, short of falling out with their
congregations : and that a clergyman who took
the ground that Christ meant literally every
word He said would get himself into very seri-
ous trouble. Meanwhile it is consoling to note
that through every war the potential impor-

166

THE CANDLE

tance of Christianity, even as a possible stand-
ard of conduct, is re-snggested, by the fact that
each revolt from Christian tenets, however en-
thusiastically abetted by all the vestries and
diaconates, results in misery everywhere. And
meanwhile, one more dynanuc illusion of ro-
mance — ^the masterpiece of romance, in fact, — ^is
temporarily baffled by coming into contact with
human dunderheadedness, very much after the
fashion in which, as was just pointed out, our
man-made social orderings often bring to noth-
ing the illusion known as love. For there is no
denying that romance is flouted when church-
men ''face the facts'' (as sturdy capitalists put
it) in a well-meant effort to patch up some su-
perficial consistency between what the congre-
gation is going to do at all hazards and the
plaguily explicit teachings of an unparochial
Saviour . . .

And the naive blasphemy of this is far worse
than ''wicked," because it is an abandonment
of aesthetic principles. For this — do you not
seef — ^is "realism": and, as I hasten to add,
such " realism" as was hardly avoidable, by
human nature. Since Constantine killed off all
serious opposition to Christianity (in the lit-
eral fashion of an unimaginative soldier), and

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BEYOND LIFE

made Christianity npon the whole the most con-
venient religion for cdvilized persons to pro-
f essy the Christian church has been in war-time
more or less driven to precisely that ^'realism"
which was denounced by Sophocles. For an
endowed and generally prosperous church can-
not but sooner or later be seduced into regard-
ing the men composing the average congrega-
tion as they are^ instead of considering what
men ^' ought to be/' and holding them to that
standard by the romantic and infallible pro-
cess of assuming, as a matter of course, that it
is a standard from which nobody ever deviates.
Unquestionably, '^realism" is not upon a
plane with arson or adultery, and so caimot be
much palliated by circumstances. And it has
even been suggested that in war-time some of
the clergy, here and there, really believe what
they preach. For the undeniable possibility of
the case being such, however, we pew-holders
are more to blame than the pastors, if only be-
cause the contemptuous indulgence everywhere
accorded the clergy, as a sort of third sex, so
shuts them off from normal life that many
of them may well come quite honestly to
confound the chief ends of human existence
with church affairs. Now war has always

168

THE CANDLE

promoted ''business/' by the simple pro-
cess of creating a need for that whidi
war destroyed War has always thus directly
benefited that staid and undraftable class of
''business" men who compose vestries. Viewed
from the cloistered and necessarily somewhat
unsophisticated standpoint of most clergymen,
it must seem self -evidently not possible that
religion was intended to interfere with the con-
tinuance in well-doing of a leading vestryman
— ^no less esteemed as a personal friend than as
a parishioner of famed integrity and benevo-
lence, — ^whose annual contribution to Foreign
Missions, and even to the Contingent Fund, is
dependent upon the state of his ledgers. That
the " business'* of such a person is divinely pro-
vided, and made prosperous, it would be im-
pious to doubt. For, through everybody acting
conscientiously, all around, the clergy in many
instances come really to believe (in common
with their congregations) that church-work
comprises that attitude toward life which is
Christianity. They come, in short, to mistake
for the light of the world the candle that illu-
minates the altar. And thus it is very often
without any conscious and intelligent time-serv-
ing, no doubt, that prelates so intrepidly expose

169

BEYOND LIFE

to detestation that lack of self-restraint which
they deplore when manifested on the battle-
field, by reproducing it in the pnlpit . .

Thns it has been for some twenty eentorieSy
and the end is not yet Meanwhile the consid-
erate person here and there to be bom among
oncoming generations will reflect that this very
human hysteria under bell-towers in no way
affected the authentic sun; and will insist that
Christianity has been not at all ^'discredited/'
but remains the happiest effort of romance.

I have divigated at such length, as to this
particular instance of the way in which the
demiurge is occasionally foiled by hiunan short-
comings, in part because it illustrates my
thesis, with vivid pigments ; and partly because,
as I too become an old fogy, I turn with re-
newed tenderness to all else that grows obso-
lete, and so am inclined to defend the church,
even in this matter, to the utmost effort of my
out-of-date prejudices.

And much as what we so long nicknamed
Christianity surrendered to material condi-
tions, so did that other pleasing product of ro-
mance, which I have termed Gallantry, in due
season compromise with material conditions,

170

THE CANDLE

though in a fashion, as I am happy to report,
far less disastrous.

For the fun of shouting out the gross names of
things is not inexhaustible. We have glanced at
the dramatic literature of Gallantry as it was
in the exuberance of youth, and we have noted
its painstaking improprieties. . . Well, when
the scented exquisites of Charles the Second's
generation, a little the worse for the wear and
tear of time, and a trifle shaken by the turmoil
and uproar of 1688, crept out of the retirement
into which the Bevolution had thrust them, to
lounge again on the shady side of the Mall, their
juniors were beginning to wonder if this in-
terminable obligation to be salacious had not
reached the point of becoming tiresome. In
large part this was the inevitable rebellion of
a new generation against the existent order,
whatever that may happen to be, in demand-
ing << the continufd slight novelty." Yet the
reaction, as always, was given its general trend
by material circumstances : for the all-powerful
Whigs had of late displayed such turpitude that
it was eminently necessary to emphasize their
pious motives in everything. Thus, when peo-

171

BEYOND LIFE

pie uncivilly pointed ont that King TVllliam
was an nnhanged thief, his adherents conld
draw attention to his regular attendance at
morning prayers: and when the Tories de-
nonnced Queen Marv as a parricide, Whigs
could complacently counter with the equally un-
deniable facts that she did beautiful needlework
and was particularly gracious to archbishops.
Many of the less exigent virtues thus became
quite modish.

The stage of course reflected this. So, after
an existence of thirty years, the new comedy
passed into a second period, like a married
rake, vastly ameliorated in conduct, and not at
all in morals. Toward the end of the seven-
teenth century it was still the fashion to speak
encomiums of ''manly Wycherley," whose pite-
ous wrecked body as yet survived his intellect:
but it was "the great Mr. Congreve'' whose
plays drew crowded houses.

For, beyond question, Mr. Congreve of the
Middle Temple was the day's foremost writer.
Such was the general opinion of his contempor-
aries, and it does not appear to have been
bitterly disputed by Congreve. He is "the
great Mr. Congreve,'' who, very much as
Wycherley had done before Fleet Prison

172

THE CANDLE

eclipsed his genius, leads fashion as well as
literature: to honor Mr. Gongreve critics con-
tend in adulation, and even the pen of misan-
tliropic John Dennis flows as with milk and
honey; whereas ^tis notorious that no woman
can resist Mr. Congreve's blandishments, from
Anne Bracegirdle the famous actress, to Henri-
etta Churchill, the equally famous Duchess of
Marlborough. He is '^the great Mr. Con-
greve": and Mr. Dryden (the late laureate, and
himself a poet of considerable parts) doth not
hesitate to predict that the name of Congreve
will survive as long to posterity as the name
of Shakespeare. But, for that matter, so long
equally will live the names of Iscariot and
Simple Simon: and while it is well enough to
leave footprints on the sands of time, it is even
more important to make sure they point in a
commendable direction. . .

Jn his youth this William Congreve wrote
four comedies that will always delight the judi-
cious, because in Congreve too was inborn the
desire to write perfectly of beautiful happen-
ings These comedies I take to be the full and
well-nigh perfect expression of the Gallant atti-

173

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tade. There has been no lack of persons to
arraign them as '* unmoral" prodnctions, and
to point out that their sprightly dialogue is not
with any painstaking exactitude modeled after
the questions and answers of the Shorter Cate-
chism. But really that sort of carping is rather
silly, Congreve was writing for a definite
audience — ^an assemblage of gallant persons, —
and must give them what they would accept
The far less lucky Marlowe, as I have just in-
dicated, was forced to write those ''comic"
scenes which make the blood of his admirers
grill with shame, because his audience de-
manded that sort of thing: and dramatists have
always labored under such necessities, very
probably before Phrynichus suffered for re-
minding the Athenians of unpleasant topics,
and quite certainly ever since Shakespeare
stooped to vilify the Maid of Domremy. Con-
greve 's auditors had shown what subjects they
considered suitable for comic treatment: and
Wycherley had so far justified their belief as
to demonstrate that from the materials they
had chosen could be constructed excellent enter-
tainment. If Congreve was to write for the
stage, he must abide by its traditions as to the
comedy of Gallantry. . .

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THE CANDLE

As for the ^'grossness'' of Congreve's
langaage, deoonim in speech is largely a mat-
ter of chronology. The gallant pleasantries
'of Congreve neither corrupted nor embar-
rassed his contemporaries. It was what they
were nsed to in daily life, with the difference
,that the Congrevean version was more deli-
.cately worded: for anecdotes which even an
apple-cheeked boy in the company of his fel-
lows might hesitate to repeat, were then nar*
rated by divines from the pnlpit. . . Congreve^
in short, has worn the mode of his day, and
permitted his art to be seriously influenced by
the life about him. As I have previously
pointed out, this is always a dangerous pro-
ceeding: and here we find a droll by-product of
such rash dalliance with '^realism",-— of de-
picting men more or less as they are, — ^in the
fact that with altered fashions the plays of
Congreve, which were formerly considered
models of elegance, have become '^ indecent"
reading. The lesson should be salutary. . .
Meanwhile we ought to be rational, and con-
cede to an acknowledged leader of society the
right to wear the style of his day, in all things,
and to be d Za mode alike in dress and speech.
Neither his language nor his periwig is just

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at present in vogae : and that is the worst which
can be said of either with justice. For really,
should you fall to the rare practise of thinking^
whether you allude to the strange woman as a
'^social problem*' or plump out with a briefer
Biblical ssnionym, the meaning conveyed is
very much the same.

There remains, of course, the question of
Congreve's ethical attitude. Toward the mis-
doings of which he treats, as innumerable mor-
alists have lamented, his tone is one of amused
acquiescence. Well, after all, that is a Gallant
requisite — ^to ** consider the world with a smile
of toleration," — and such remains the Gallant
viewpoint even nowadays, however infre-
quently it is displayed in electrotype : Wycher-
ley, as I have said, had perfidiously set forth
the fact that Nemesis is by no means an in-
fallible accountant: and Congreve, too, con-
ceded this, though with more urbanity. For
where the cynicism of Wycherley is exhibited
in an onslaught, that of Congreve takes shape
as a shrug. Wycherley, like most of us, was
uncomfortable when people talked exaltedly
outside of pulpits, and being free of obligations
we labor under of pretending to like it, ex-
pressed his annoyance forcibly. But Congreve

176

THE CANDLE

bmshed aside snch verbiage, and declined to
make a pother over catchwords. Meanwhile ho
looked about him, and was convinced that men
were not immaculate creatures: and his view
of women's natural talent for chastity became
such as nowadays only a very gifted woman
dare express. . .

So Congreve makes no effort toward elevat-
ing or instructing his audience, despite his cool
assertion that in each of his comedies is hidden
a fable. ''I designed the moral first, and to
that moral I invented the fable,** you will find
the unconscionable fellow writing; and if this
be so, the disguise of the apologue is remark-
ably efficient. For unquestionably none save
Congreve ever accused his plots of being
builded to point a moral In fact, the unpreju-
diced would hardly have suspected his com-
edies of being constructed at all, for they have
throughout the formless incoherence of ordi-
nary human existence, and resemble actual life
also in that the insignificance of what is being
done is painstakingly veiled with much speak-
ing. At the final curtain, you have no idea of
the story: in memory lingers at most a glit-
tering confusion of persons hiding in closets,
juggling with important documents, inconse-

177

BEYOND LIFE

quently soliloquizing over their private affairs
for the benefit of eavesdroppers, and casually
marrying masked strangers. You recall,
clearly enough, that the young people have got
the better of their seniors, and that all the love-
ly wives en second noces have ** deceived'' their
doddering husbands : but, in spite of the Latin
on the title-page and the rhymes at the end,
the moral lesson inculcated remains a trifle
vague.

Congreve to the contrary, this fine gentle-
man's object is not so much to castigate the
follies of his time with derision, as to perfect
the sort of gallant conversation he forlornly
hoped some day to conduct in real life with
one of his duchesses. Provided his puppets
talk their very best, it does not much matter
how they behave. Unhuman conduct, at all
events, is unmaterial in characters created ex-
pressly to voice clever thoughts, since to have
such thoughts is, by ill luck, not generally a
human trait. For nowhere in any drawing-
room was ever spoken anything like Congreve 's
dialogue: and his people all live in glass houses
which, very luckily for the tenants, are located

178

THE CANDLE

in the oountry that Lamb long ago called the
Utopia of Gallantry. . . The wisest may well
uibend occasionally^ to give conscience a half-
holiday, and procure a passport to this delec-
table land. True, there are, as always in travel,
the custom-house regulations to be observed:
in this realm exist no conscientious scruples, no
probity, no religion, no pompous notions about
altruism, nor any sacred tie of any sort, and
such impedimenta will be confiscated at the
frontier. We are entering a territory wherein
ethics and ideals are equally contraband. For
Congreve's readers make the grand tour of a
new Arcadia, where Strephon wears a peruke,
and Phyllis is arrayed in the latest mode from
the Court of Versailles ; and where Priapos, for
all that he remains god of the garden, — about
the formal alley-ways of which flee bevies of
coy nymphs (somewhat encumbered by bro-
caded gowns) pursued by velvet-coated shep-
herds, who carry, in place of vulgar crooks, the
most exquisite of clouded canes, — ^where the
Lampsacene's statue, I repeat, has been ameli-
orated into the likeness of a tailor's dummy. It
is a care-free land, where life, untrammeled
by the restrictions of moral codes, untoward
weather, limited incomes or apprehension of

179

BEYOND LIFE

the police, has no legitimate object save the
pursuit of amorous pleasures. Allowing for a
century of progress and refinement, it is very
much the country in which dwelt Marlowe's
Hero and Leander.

And probably this atmosphere of holiday de-
tachment from the ordinary duties and obliga-
tions of existence is the milieu best adapted,
after all, to exhilarating comedy. To picture
people solely in a temporary and irresponsible
withdrawal from the everyday business of life
is a serviceable device toward lightheartedness :
and you will find that in more recent times a
delightful use of it was made by that gener-
ally unappreciated artist, Henry Harland.
Here is a man whom I have sometimes sus-
pected of a deliberate attempt to reproduce
something of this Congrevean atmosphere, as
well as almost all the other deliciously improb-
able conventions of the comedy of Gallantry, in
a tale of more modem conditions. Even so, I
am free to confess that I once thought Harland's
books of more importance than I would care
to assert them to-day. For of course it is no
longer permissible to believe that, provided the
puppets talk their very best, it does not much
matter how they behave: and my juniors cow

180

THE CANDLE

me with their all-devastating ^'earnestness."
But to revert to Gongreve's older chronides
of house-parties and week-ends is to enconnter
some of the most entertaining company in lit-
erature. Thereamong are the fine gentlemen,
Careless, and Scandal, and Valentine, and Bell-
mour, and Mirabell, and the even finer fops.
Brisk and Tattle,-— magnanimous ''Turk Tat-
tle,'' who, being accidentally married, is hon-
estly grieved, on his wife's account "The
devil take me if I was ever so much concerned
at anything in my life. Poorwomanl Oad,but
I'm sorry for her, too, for I believe I shall lead
her a danmed sort of life." • . And Lady
Froth, and Lady Plyant, and Belinda, and
Cynthia, and Angelica, and the well-matched
sisters Frail and Foresight, who between them
lost and found a bodkin. And the two Wit-
wouds, and Ben Legend, and Lady Wishf ort,
and Prue, and Sir Sampson, are other names
in the list one could go on eniunerating, for
delight in the pleasant memories evoked. Even
for Mrs. Mincing and her unsuccessful endeav-
ors to pin up hair with love-letters in prose,
one has a tenderness, and hears with regret
how "poor Mincing tift and tift all the
morning" . . .

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Besides, with Mrs. Mincing, according to the
Stage Directions, enters Mrs. Millamant • •
It is not easy to say too much in praise of Milla>
mant : for there is nothing in polite comedy that
can pretend to rival her save Celim^e, and the
little French widow is not one-tenth so likable,
since the English minx inveigles yon into a sort
of fond and half -vexed adoration, from the
moment she appears ''in fnll sail, with her fan
spread and her streamers out, and a shoal of
fools for tenders," till the final settlement of
her heart-affairs, when she has promised to
have Mirabell, on the condition (amobg so
many others which read more curiously, and
are snfSiciently np-to-date to indnde eugenic
provisos) that ''we never visit tpgether, nor
go to the play together, nor call names like love
and sweetheart and the rest of the nauseous
cant, but be as well-bred as if we were not mar-
ried at alL" • • So she vanishes, through a
pleasantly shaded avenue in the St James's
Park of Utopia: and one envies the lucky fel-
low as she passes, with mincing steps, painted
and frail under her nodding bows, — ^* far die
et peinte et frile parmi les ncBtids inormes de

182

THE CANDLE

rubans/'—axtd to the very tips of those slender
fingers, which are half-hidden by a gleam of
jewels, in everything one sees of her fantastic
and adorable. It stays no wonder that Mirabell
was confessedly as indulgent to her faults as to
his own. For Millamant is not to be remem-
bered as so many paragraphs of printed
dialogue: you recollect her as an elfin woman
actually seen, heard and capitulated to, be-
cause there was no resisting the cool splen-
dor of her eyes (enhanced by a small black
star of courtplaster), and the spell of her tinted
lips, her sweet and insolent laughter, and, un-
derljring all, her genuine tenderness. • . ''None
but herself can be her parallel," as Theobald
unhappily expressed it, in referring to quite
another person: and English comedy has pro-
duced nothing else that rivals this brilliant
figure.

Of course she was the cause that Congreve
never married. Having once been intimate
with Mrs. Millamant, it was inevitable he should
find flesh-and-blood coquettes a little tedious.
Lideed, when you deliberate his Utopian serag-
lio, you cannot but wonder how he managed

183

BEYOND LIFE

after his desertion thereof , to put up with thirty
years of mere duchesses. . . . The considerate
reader will always be in love with Congreve*s
women; with those lost ladies of a yester-year
which was never ahnanacked; and with the per-
ennial charm of these delectable girls, that never
wore rose-tinted flesh. For they are in every
thing pre-eminently adorable, these mendacious,
subtle, pleasure-loving, babbling, generous, vo-
latile, brave, witty, and sumptuous young jill-
flirts who rule in the Utopia of Gallantry. So
all true cognoscenti must stay forever enamored
of them; of their alert eyes, their little satin-
slippered feet, their saucy tip-tilted little noses,
their scornful little carmine mouths, and their
glittering restless little hands, — ^f or they are all
mignonnes. Nay, the more discerning will even
value them the more for their bright raiment
and uncountable fallals, — ^their stomachers and
tight sleeves, their lappets and ribbons, their
top-knots and pinners, their lace streamers, and
fans, and diamonds, and comfit-boxes; and,
above all, that fantastic edifice of hair which
rises in tiers and billows and turrets, above
their mischievous small faces : whereas Herod
of Jewry could not but find something heart-
moving in their infinite youth. It is, upon the

184

THE CANDLE

whole^ consoling to reflect that no girls like
these were ever confined in impermanent flesh :
for then, after setting at most a trio of decades
by the ears, they wonld have grown old, and that
tragedy wonld have been quite unbearable. But
since these gallant minxes existed only in ro-
mance, their youth remains immortal, and has
made glad some seven generations of adorers.

And so, the gravest charge which equity can
lay against them is that they spoiled Congreve's
interest in all other women. . . . But it will
not do too closely to consider what unfilial havoc
must have been wrought, off and on, by book-
women, in the heart-life of their begetters.
Every romantic artist is a Goriot and wastes
existence in adoration of his dream daughters
as they move in loftier spheres. • • • Mean-
while one may well pity this fond lover's wife.
For what chance had poor Ann Shakespeare
against Beatrice and Cleopatra and Bosalindt
Nor will the judicious deny that Isabella Thack-
eray lost her mind with considerable provoca-
tion when her husband was perpetually closeted
now with that red-stockinged jade from Castle-
wood, and now with the notorious Mrs. Rawdon
Crawley. Even Scott's marriage, they say, was
not eminently successful: and you may depend

185

BEYOND LIFE

upon it that at the bottom of the trouble was
one Mistress Diana Vertion of Osbaldistone
Hall, in the Cheviots. Indeed, the more perspi-
cacious will have no manner of doubt that Cath-
erine Dickens was driven into a separation
through Charles's impending affair with that
Wilf er girl, coming as it did upon the heels of
his undisguised relations with the first Mrs.
Copperfield • • But all that, too, is a part of
the human sacrifice through whidi Art is yet
honored by her zealous servitors. For to be
quite contentedly married may be taken as
proof positive that a writer has no very striking
literary genius, and being unable to outdo na-
ture in creating women, is satisfied to put up
with her makeshifts.

To Art, then, this William Congreve gave
whole-heartedallegiance until he was (like Mar-
lowe) a young fellow of twenty-nine. At that
age Congreve also died, as an artist Physi-
cally — ^and it is toward this fact my pre-amble
has from the first been making headway, — ^phys-
ically Congreve survived for some thirty years ;
and during this period wrote not another line.
You will search in vain to find another case

186

THE CANDLE

which really resembles this. At twenty-nine
Congreve was the most famous and most widely
admired writer of an age distinguished in let-
ters : and at twenty-nine he put aside literature
forever, like a coat of last year's cut. . • •

One perceives that this spruce gambler for
Immortality found the game not worth the can-
dle. .* . . Of the real economy which is prac-
tised by the creative writer I have just spoken :
yet this unhumanly rational course of life is
adopted but as a shield against entire extinc-
tion, and proverbially every shield has two sides.
I find it on record that the obverse — ^the not so
rational, and therefore more human side — of
this buckler against oblivion was fairly pre-
sented by another fine literary artist, whose
warped soul inhabited the crooked body of Alex-
ander Pope. '^Men will remember me. Truly
a mighty foundation for pride I when the utmost
I can hope for is but to be read in one island,
and to be thrown aside at the end of one age.
Indeed, I am not even sure of that much. I
print, and print, and print. And when I collect
my verses into books, I am altogether uncertain
whether to look upon myself as a man building
a monument or burying the dead. It sometimes
seems to me that each publication is but a soi-

ls?

BEYOND LIFE

tarn f nnerttl of many wasted years. For I have
given all to the verse-making. Granted that the
sacrifice avails to rescue my name from obliv-
ion, what will it profit me when I am dead and
care no more for men's opinions f . . • And
Wycherley is asserted to have agreed with the
indomitable little hornet of Twickenham.
** There was a time/' says Wycherley, **when I
too was foolishly intent to divert the leisure
hours of posterity. But reflection assured me
that posterity had, thus far, done very little to
place me under that or any other obligation.
Ah, not Youth, health and a modicum of intelli-
gence are loaned to most of us for a while, and
for a terribly brief while. They are but loans,
and Time is waiting greedily to snatch them
from us. For the perturbed usurer knows that
he is lending us, perforce, three priceless pos-
sessions, and that till our lease runs out we are
free to dispose of them as we elect. Now, had
I more jealously devoted my allotment of these
treasures toward securing for my impressions
of the universe a place in yet unprinted libra-
ries, I would have made an investment from
which I could not possibly have derived any
pleasure, and which would have been to other
people of rather dubious benefit'*

THE CANDLE

In very much this fashion it wotdd seem that
Congreve reasoned Like Wycherley, Con-
greve in his first youth wrote in a manner that
will always delight the elect, because tl^e desire
to write perfectly of beautiful happenings was,
with him also, innate: and throughout all this
thrice-polished writing he presented so irresist-
ibly a plea for what I have called the Gallant
attitude toward life, that in the end he con-
verted himself. One must make the best of this
world as a residence; keep it as far as possible
a cheery and comfortable place; practise ur-
banity toward the other transient occupants;
and not think too despondently nor too often of
the grim Sheriff, who arrives anon to dispos-
sess you, no less than all the others, nor of any
subsequent and unpredictable legal adjust-
ments: — ^that is what the creed of Gallantry
came to (long before Congreve played with ver-
bal jewelry under the later Stuarts) when Hor-
ace first exhorted well-bred persons to accept
life's inconveniences with a shrug, — cunara lento
temperet risu, — and to make the most of their
little hour of youth and sunlight in Augustan
Bome ; and the Tent-maker sang to very much
that rueful cadence in the Naish^pur of Malik
Shah, when the Plantagenets were not yet come

189

BEYOND LIFE

into England. . • But Congreve was more hu-
manly logical than these elder sceptics, who
kept on laboriously refining phrases about the
vanity, among so many other vanities, of writ-
ing at alL For he devoted thirty very pleasant
years to gourmandizing and good wine, and to
innumerable lovely women, — ^who, though not
Millamants to be sure, were chosen solely on ac-
count of obvious merits, from the green-room
and the peerage impartially, — ^and to reading
new books, and to making much brilliant and
quite profitless talk with other equally amiable
and well-to-do and indolent fine gentlemen. His
apostasy to romance, in short, was even more
thorough-going than that ecclesiastical aban-
donment of romance which I just now lamented.
And he undertook for the remainder of his life
no heavier responsibility than to sign on every
quarter-day a receipt for his salary as Secre-
tary of Jamaica, and perhaps every once in a
while to wonder where Jamaica might be. • • .

Lideed, to all of us who have essayed the
word-game, at which one plays for a dole of
remembrance in our former lod^gs after the
Sherifif has haled us hence, there comes at times

190

THE CANDLE

a dispiriting doubt as to whether the game is
worth the candle. Potent and honey-sweet, very
certainly, is the allure of this desire to write
perfectly of beantifnl happenings: for all that,
it may well be the contrivance of some particu-
larly sardonic-minded devil: and beyond doubt,
if follow the desire you must, you will be the
wiser for scrutinizing its logic none too closely.
You had best yield blindly to the inborn instinct,
and write as well as you possibly can, much as
the coral zoophyte btdlds his atoll, without any
theorizing. Assuredly you have not time to
count how many candles are being squandered,
or what precisely is their value. . . . For here
too we cross the trail of another dynamic illu-
sion.

Of the Dive Bouteitte I have spoken at suflK-
cient length. Apart from this sort of sacrifice,
however, the literary artist who is really in ear-
nest must be content to do without any number
of desirable human traits which he cannot af-
ford. . • • Thus, although modesty may seem
to him a most engaging virtue, his mainstay in
life must always be an exaggerated and thrice
exaggerated opinion of his own value. Should

191

BEYOND LIFE

he once admit that what he sets abont is by any
possibility not the most important thing in the
universe^ and quite incommensurate by every-
day criterions, then his aesthetic grave is al-
ready mounded: for the sole alternative is that
he writes reading-matter, which is as much as
codfish or clocks or honorary college degrees a
recognized staple commodity. He has thus his
choice between the inconveniendes of appea,ring
to responsible people what is popularly termed
a gloomy ass, or of figuring even in his own
mind as a verbal huckster. Since write he must,
he is restricted either laboriously to pleasure
his ideals or his paymasters, and can but pick
between being a paranoiac or a prostitute.

Then, too, he must avoid all persons whose
tastes are similar to his, and so is condenmed
to continuous loneliness. Were there nothing
else, the romantic artist is a parasite on human
life, in the manner of a mistletoe seed, which
roots in the oak, draws nutriment therefrom,
and so evolves a more delicate type of life, that
does but very slightly resemble an oak-tree.
iAnd parasites cannot thus nourish one another,
nor can the artist come by serviceable notions
of ordinary life in the society of his abnormal
peers. I grant you that distinguished men of

192

THE CANDLE

letters have often formed coteries, but it was
after their best work was done: and I take it
that each fact in part explains the other. Be-
sideSy the literary artist who aims to be even
more than a valued contributor to magazines,
and hopes through ensuing ages to rank above
kings, cannot but despise the fellow tjrpist who
thinks only of royalties: whereas he is inclined
to view his rivals in aesthetic endeavor with very
much the complacency of a teased cobra. • • •
Thus doomed to live with wholesome folk, the
artist cannot afford to make a sane and candid
estimate of his work's importance. The tide of
circumstance sets so strong against belief in his
laborious revisions amounting to anything
whatever, that he can but despairingly essay to
counterbalance affairs by virtue of a megalo-
maniac's confidence alike in the worth of what
he is resolved to do and in his fitness to perform
it immeasurably better than any one else. His
daily associates, for whose intelligence (and
there is the rub) he cannot but entertain con-
siderable respect, may see clearly enough that
art affords in the last outcome a diversion for
vacant evenings, or furnishes a museum to
which sane people resort only when they accom-
pany their visitors from out-of-town : but of this

193

BEYOND LIFE

verdict the artist must not dare to grant the
weighty if not absolute justice. In fine, he must
be reconciled to having most people think him
a f ooly and to suspecting that they are not en-
tirely mistaken. . . .

Moreover, the literary artist is condemned to
strengthen this belief by means of that very
drudgery wherewith he hopes to disprove it.
For where other persons decently attempt to
conceal their foibles and mistakes and vices,
this maniac, stung by the gadfly of self-expres-
sion, will catalogue all his and print them in a
book. Since write he must, interminably he
writes about himself because (in this respect at
least resembling the other members of his race)
he has no certain knowledge as to anyone else.
And the part he has played in other person's
lives he will likewise expose in a manner that
is not always chivalrous. Indeed, he will under-
take much unethical research with the assist-
ance of women who do not entirely comprehend
they are participating in a philosophical experi-
ment. And all this, too, he will print in his
damned book, for from a social standpoint the
creative literary artist is always a traitor, and
not infrequently a scoundrel Meanwhile he
becomes callous, by virtue of never yielding so

194

THE CANDLE

entirely to any emotion as to lose sight of its
being an interesting topic to write about All
that which is naturally fine in him, in f act, he
will so study, and regard from every aspect,
that from much handling it grows dingy. And
very clearly does the luckless knave perceive
this fact, for all the while, amid Ihese constant
impairments, his vision grows more quick and
keen, and mercilessly shows him the twisted and
scathed thing he is.

Nor is this the final jibe. However pleasant it
be to dream of survival in the speech and ac-
tions and libraries of posterity, reflection sug-
gests that this ** immortality" is deplorably pa-
rochial. For we and our contemporaneous
wasters of shoe-leather and printer's ink, it
may be recalled, are that ''posterity'' to which
Shakespeare and Milton so confidently ad-
dressed themselves : and it were folly to pretend
that to us, as a generation, either of these poets
is to-day, not merely as generally known and
read, but as generally an intellectual influence,
as Mr. Harold Bell Wright or Mrs. Gene Strat-

195

BEYOND LIFE

ton Porter* Of course, a century hence, there
will still be a few readers for Hamlet, whereas
Freckles — ^which is regarded, I believe, as Mrs.
Porter's masterpiece — ^will conceivably be out of
print Yet is it grimly dubious if, in the ulti-
mate outcome of time, the great creative artist
exercises more influence, all in all, or is more
widely a public benefactor, than is the perpe-
trator of a really popular noveL . . • I have
spoken of the literary artist's patient immola-
tion, which he himself contrives in order that
his dream, once snared with comely and fit
words, may be perpetuated, and that so the art-
ist may usurp the brain-cells and prompt the
flesh of unborn generations. And I have spoken,
too, of the Fausttis, at some length, as ^e in-
disputable masterpiece that it is: but suppose
you compare its actual aggregate influence upon
humanity with the influence, say, of the novel
called Queed which a few years ago was so ex-
tensively purchased. Not even the publishers

'Gharteris here refers to two very popular noTelSflts of his
daj. 'It ifl hie ahnoet dairvoTant power of reading tbe human
■otsl that has made Mr. Wright's books among the most remark-
able works of the present age." — Oregon Journal, Portland, "It
is difficult to speak of the work of Gene Stratton Porter and
BOl to eall upon all the superlatives of praise in the language.**
I Franeiido Coll.

196

THE CANDLE

need pretend nowadays that Q%tee4 was an im*
portant contribution to literature : but this book
was read by millions^ and by many of its read-
ers was naively enjoyed and admired and more
or less remembered Queed did thus somewhat
influence all these honest folk, and tinge their
minds, such as they were. Now the Faustus,
during three centuries of polite speeches about
it, has not with any such directness tinged the
minds of millions, nor has it been read even by
thousands of their own volition. Nor has Ibe
Fausttis ever given that general pleasure which
was provoked by Queed. And moreover, the
** uplifting*' optimism of Queed, it must be re-
membered, really brought out that which was
best in the readers who took the book seriously.
You cannot, of course, evoke from any source
more than is already there, and to every end
the means must be commensurate : so that, while
to bring out the best there is in a wrecked vessel
or a gold-mine or a person of some culture re-
quires a deal of elaborated apparatus, a nut-
pick will do as much for a walnut, and a popular
novel for the average mind And the point is,
that this average mind, which from Queed de-
rived enjoyment and some benefit, has (after a
brief toleration of the Faustus on account of its

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BEYOND LIFE

dreadful ''comic" scenes) for some three cen-
turies perceived in Marlowe's masterpiece
''just another one of those old classics/' and
will so view it always. . . . We thus reach by
plain arithmetic the proof that as a writer Mr.
Sydnor Harrison (who wrote Qtieed*) has ex-
ercised a greater influence, and has really
amounted to more, than Christopher Marlowe:
and continuing to be quite honest in our mathe-
matics, we find that as touches influence, neither
craftsman can pretend to rival the sympathetic
scribe whose daily column of advice to the love-
lorn is printed simultaneously by hundreds of
our leading public journals, and daily advises
millions as to the most delicate and important
relations of their existence.

And should you raise the objection that, none
the less, the Fausttis is fine literature, whereas
Queed is fairly answerable to some other de-
scription, — ^that the drama is profuse in verbal
magic, and the novel, to put the matter as
civilly as possible, is not remarkable for literary
art, — ^I can but remind you that, after all, your

*''0f an American authors who have made their d^vt in the
twentieth centnry, I regard Mr. Henry Sjdnor Harrison as the
most promising. ... Of all our younger writers he seems to
have the largest natural endowment." — ^William Lyon Phelps, in
The Advance of the Bnglieh Novel (published 1916).

198

THE CANDLE

protest amounts to astonishmgly little. All you
assert is true enough, but to what, in the high
and potent name of St. Stultitia (who presides
over the popularity of our reading-matter)
does your objection amount T Even to the very,
very few who can distinguish between compe*
tent work and botchery, the "style** of an
adroit writer is apt to become an increasing an*
noyauce, as he proceeds with such miraculous
and conscious nicety: until at last you are fret-
ted into active irritation that the fellow does not
ever stumble and flounder into some piore hu-
manly inadequate way of expressing himself.
And for the rest, how many persons really care,
or even notice, whether a book be conscien-
tiously written t It is merely "something to
read*': and they, good souls, have been reduced
to looking it over, not quite by any reverential
quest of "art," but by a lack of anything else
to do.

For literature is a starveling cult kept alive
by the "literary.** Such literature has been,
and will continue to be, always. I grant you
that it will continue always. But always, too,
its masterworks will affect directly no one save
the "literary**: and to perceive tMs is the seri-
ous artist *s crowning discouragement For he

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has every reason to know what ** literary*' per-
sons are, if but by means of discomfortable in-
trospection^ and all and sundry of them he de-
spises. At an Authors' League Dinner, or any
similar assemblage of people who ** write,*' you
may always detect the participants uneasily
peeping toward mirrors, to see if they really do
look like the others. • • • And it is only per-
sons such as these, the artist sometimes com-
prehends forlornly, who will be making any to-
do over him a thousand years from to-day I At
such depressing moments of prevision, he rec-
ognizes that this desire to write perfectly, and
thus to win to "literary" immortality, is but
another dynamic illusion : and he concedes, pre-
cisely as Congreve long ago detected, tiiat,
viewed from any personal standpoint, the game
is very far from being worth the candle.

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tHE MOUNTEBANK

acr

— Vai^f ireD, sbt vwUtf iraDt a moil intereffciiig
gravity! . . .

— He is very perfect indeed! Now, pray what did he
mean l^ thatr

— Whjy l^ that shake of the head, he gave you to
nnderstaiid that even thon^ th^ had more jnatiee in
their eanae^ and wisdom in their mea snre s jot^ if there
was not a greater spirit shown on the part of the people^
the eonntry would at last fall a saeriilee to the hostile
ambition of the Spanish monaieh j.

—The devil! did he mean all that hy shaking hia
headf

— ^Evesy word of i^— if he shook his head as I taaght

-^Tke Critic

VII

Which Indicates the
Mountebank

BUT it ocours to me that I have thus far
spoken of Gallantry as a force in litera-
ture. That is, past doubt, its most impor-
tant aspect, since literature is compounded of so
much finer material than life, and is builded so
much more durably, that it affords the worthier
field of exercise for any and all ideas. But of
course when the spirit of Oallantry was ex-
pressed in books, man continued as always to
play the ape to his dreams, and clumsily began
to reproduce the fantasies of Wycherley and
Congreve in everyday conduct. Thus it was in
the eighteenth century that Oallantry found its
most adequate exposition in actual life, which
is customarily at least a generation behind its
current reading-matter. And concerning a pe-
culiarly striking instance of this vital imitative-
ness I must for a moment digress, before ex-
plaining its very poignant relevancy to what I
have in mind as to another dynamic illusion.

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BEYOND LIFE

Indeed, in the eighteenth century men were
reading much of that depressing literature for
which the unborn Victorians were to furnish
illustrations. In letters the exit of Mrs. Milla-
mant seemed to have marked both the apex and
the final curtain of the comedy of Gallantry.
After Congreve, and his colleagues Vanbrugh
and Farquahar, as no doubt you remember, fol-
lows that dreary interval wherein dramatic art
floundered and splashed, and eventually
drowned, in a stagnant pond of morality. This
was the heyday of '^do-me-good, lackadaisical,
whining, make-believe comedies." For now it
was to the responsibilities of actual life that
comedy of Sentiment attempted to resign the
ipirit, and the comedy of Gallantry seemed in
a fair way to give up the ghost llien life made
a fine plagiarism, and enriched zoology by re-
producing in flesh and blood the manifestly im-
possible jeune premier of the comedy of Gal-
lantry. . . .

In consequence, some three-quarters of a cen-
tury after Mrs. Millamant ''dwindled into a

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THE MOUNTEBANK

wife/' a youth of twenty made his appearance
at Bath, possessed of no resources save good
looks, a tolerable supply of impudence, and —
life being resolved to do the thing thoroughly, —
a translation of Aristaenetus. By virtue of
these assets Dick Sheridan forthwith becomes
the ruler of that mixed company of valetudinar-
ians and dowagers, of second-rate bucks and for-
tune-hunters, retired army-officers, and ladies of
rank '^chiefly remarkable for the delicacy of
their reputations." Brilliant, young and vic-
torious, he has only to appear in order to be
admired In the Pump-room there is no dandy
who attracts more attention than ''handsome
Dick": and it is in accordance with his election
that the trousered portion of Bath sodety mod-
els its cravats. . • .

Nor was he less popular among women. His
stianner toward them, it is recorded, had just
the proper blending of respect and audacity. No
one could say more impudent things with a
greater air of humility. Here was a macaroni
who made love-verses and love with equal grace,
however rarely these perilous accomplishments
are united in one artist. . . • Then^ too, to a
woman the poet who appeals to her vanity is

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BEYOND LIFE

one thing, and the lover who touches her heart
quite another: for the rhymester, while pleas-
ing and appropriate for rare occasions, is a trifle
outlandish for everyday wear. Besides, the
average woman is bored by poetry, if only b^
cause girl-children proverbially inherit tKfi
tastes of their fathers. So Daphne, wise in her
generation, fled the embraces of Apollo, and her
sisters have followed the example, to the en-
ridmient of the world's literature by an infinity
of wailing sonnets. . . . But Sheridan's love-
verses are really iezquisite trifles, without the
least taint of sincerity; and so, it may be that
they did not greatly hinder him in winning the
heart of Maria Linley, the reigning belle of
Bath, "upon whom Nature seemed to have lav-
ished her richest treasures, and by the example
of her generosity to have roused Art to noble
emulation.'' Certain it is, by whatever means
he attained Miss Linley's favor, that Sheridan
succeeded in making fools of some ten or twelve
other suitors, and in eloping with the young
lady to Paris, in the true style of Oallant com-
edy. There they were married: and on their
return to England Sheridan, still in the r61e of
jeime premier, fought two duels with one of his
outwitted rivals. . . . Throughout, as you will

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rememberi he treated the entire affair as being
a frolic; and— with jnst the appropriate dra*
matic touch,— invited his antagonist to snp with
him and the seconds the night before they met
in battle. The invitation was declined, which
seems almost a pity: and the enconnter, of
course, was not lethal, since life was plagiaris-
ing from the comic stage. . . •

So began the series of improbable scenes in
which Sheridan was to figure as the hero. Be-
ing, as he entirely comprehended, cast for the
part, he enacted it with sufficient sentiment to
render him attractive to the audience, and with
enough variety to prevent the attitudinizing
growing tiresome to him : and it is as a piece of
histrionic art that we ought to judge the life of
Sheridan. • . . Thus at first he is the jeune
premier of the comedy; a handsome mounte-
bank, no better than he should be perhaps, but
making, in his embroidered coat and red-heeled
shoes, a prodigiously pleasing figure. So the
young rogue struts in the sunlight,— prof oundlv
conscious that the men all run after >iiTtt, and
none of the women can resist him. Misbehav-
ijig himself he is, of course, and having a de-
lightful time of it, too. And he is perfectly con-
tent, as 7et» to let more prudent people say

207

BEYOND LIFE

whatever fhey will, and croak any number of
warnings aa to the follies of this world provid-
ing fuel for the next, because after all he is not
committing any enormities. He is the jeune
premier of the comedy: and at the bottom of
onr hearts the majority of us can find a sneak-
ing fondness, and a fund of sympathy, for this
graceless youth, who has thus far manifested no
nobler desire than that of outshining his fellow
dandies, and no more elevated notion of happi-
ness than a '^wef night at the tavern. • • • It
is the attitude which romance has taught us to
adopt toward the sowers of wild oats, and rea-
son has nothing to do with it

With marriage, the mountebank entered the
larger world of London, and turned playwright,
as a temporary makeshift to help meet the ex-
penses of that fine establishment in Portman
Square he had just set up on credit Within
five years he thus completed and produced six
potboilers: and three of these were master-
works. . . . Sheridan was the very last ad-
herent of ''that laughing painted French bag-
gage, the Comic Muse who came over from the
Continent with Charles, after the Restoration,''

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THE MOUNTEBANK

—a not-immacnlate nymph, who, as we have
seen had been blithe and rather shameless in her
traffic with Wycherley and Congreve: but her
merriment is less free now that she inspires
The Rivals and The School for Scandal. De-
cidedly, one reflects, her stay in England has im-
proved the minx: there is a kindlier sound to
her voice, and her laughter echoes with a heart-
ier ring. She remains audacious, and retains
her rouge and gauds: but under all the tinsel
and frippery beats a generous wild loving hu-
man heart. • . • So you reflect, in spite of
yourself: for this mountebank-artist, Sheridan^
knows perfectly well the value of what pub-
Ushers describe without compunction in private
converse, and glowingly commend in type as
''wholesome sentiment/'

It was a clever schoolboy who defined a pla-
giarist as ''a writer of plays." Sheridan has
taken an idea from George Villiers, a character
from Fielding, a situation from Moliere, and so
on, with the light fingers of an inveterate bor-
rower: he has mingled all, and has flavored the
mixture with jests of his own compounding and
of his neighbor's: the materials are mostly sto-
len, yet the ragout is unmistakably Sheridan's.
And though he confessedly write potboilers, he

209

BEYOND LIFE

is no hasty composer nor careless workman:
for in this man too was inborn that irrational
desire to write perfectly: and these speeches
which come off so airily, and these scenes that
seem written at whiteheat, were laboriously eon- •
stmcted, and revised, and polished and re-pol-
ished to the very last degree of refinement, be-
fore the author exposed them to the glare of
footlights. For it is still possible to consult
Sheridan's rough drafts of all this sprightly
elegance, and they read queerly enough. . • •
Here is one Solomon Teazle, a widower who
has lost five children, and talks over his wife's
extravagance with the butler: before Sheridan
has done with him this Teazle will have entered
knighthood, as Sir Peter, and immortality will
bestow the accolade. Here is Solomon's ill-
bred, stupid and impertinent wife, — ^who when
she steps upon the stage will be that Lady Tea-
zle who so gracefully poignarded reputations,
and led the van of a regiment of misunderstood
heroines toward discovery in an unmarried
man's apartments by their husbands. . . . And
so the tale goes. Over and over again Sheridan
wrote and re-wrote his potboilers until they
were masterpieces. The point is that to the con-
siderate person it is well-nigh pathetic to de-

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THE MOUNTEBANK

toot this splendid mountebank taking so mneh
paina over anything. . . . And then, like Con-
greve^ he recognized that the word-game is not
worth the candle. ''Deuce take posterity!'' he
is reported to have summed it up. ''A sensible
man will bear in mind that all this world's deli-
eades are to be won, if ever, from one's con-
temporaries. And people are generous toward
sodal rather than literary talents, for the sen-
sible reason that they derive more pleasure
from an agreeable companion at dinner than
from having a rainy afternoon rendered en-
durable by some book or another."

So the mountebank very sensibly turned man
of affairs,— just as in comedy the scapegrace
son is prone to astound everybody and outwit
his delighted father by disclosing unsuspected
business ability, — and, with borrowed money,
purchased his own theatre. A trifle later (and
again with borrowed money) he bought a seat
in Parliament, and set up as a statesman. And
that was the end of his career in letters, for as
an artist Sheridan also, by a quaint coincidence,
perished at twenty-nine. . . .

Meanwhile it is a brilliant literary feast which
the youth of this mountebank purveyed. The
lights are all rose-color, the wine is good

211

BEYOND LIFS

(though borrowed and nnpaid for), fhe women
are beautiful, and all the men have wit Yon
cannot but delight in this assemblage of light-
hearted persons, and in the prevailing glitter/
which is gem-like, beyond doubt, and yet is un-
accountably suggestive of rhinestones. • • •

There is no denying that the funeral pyre of
the comedy of Gallantry blazed very notably in
the wit of Sheridan. Yet The Rivals and The
School for Scandal, brilliant as they are, can
hardly be ranked with Congreve's verbal pyro-
technics in The Way of the World and The
Double-Dealer. Nor is the comparison quite
fair, since Sheridan's plays are, from aesthetic
standpoints, too disastrously handicapped by
the strivings of their author, as though this
were a necessary part of his emulation of the
highest social circles, to wed the incompatible.
This splendid mountebank has made deliberate
attempt to blend the old school with the new,
and to infuse into the comedy of Oallantry **a
wholesome sentiment" It is unnecessary to
point out that the demand for such literary trea-
cle has always been unfailing, and that aucto-
rial mountebanks have always done therein a
thriving trade: Euripides dispensed such
sweetmeats in Athens very anciently, and in

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Amerioan publishers' lists the Cinderella leg-
end masquerades perennially as a new noveL

• • . Here the results are those dialogues be-
tween Julia and Faulkland, — ^the love-scenes
which made The Rivals a popular success, and
which nowadays we condone because they are
omitted in representation, and there is no stat-
ute compelling anyone to read them. For here
the rhinestone glitter is at its cheapest ''When
hearts deserving happiness would unite their
fortunes, Virtue would crown them with the un-^
fading garland of modest hurtless flowers ; but
ill- judging Passion will force the gaudier rose
into the wreath, whose thorn offends them when
its leaves are dropped.'' Beally, for anyone
who concludes a masterpiece of comedy in just
that fashion there would seem to be no punish-
ment quite severe enough: and yet the dictates
of ''wholesome sentiment" have elsewhere
brought about conclusions even more flagrant,
and continue to breed remunerative inanities.

• . • . Many of us are not a little grateful for
the fact that in writing The School for Scandal
Sheridan steered an ingenious middle-course,
and caused Charles Surface and Maria to do all
their love-making before the play began« Their
brief encounter at the end is inoffensive: and

213

BEYOND LIFE

the judicious will pass very lightly over the sop
thrown to sentiment in the reforming wastrel's
pentametric outburst

So the mountebank gave up literature, and
became a man of affairs. . • • And with him
went a continual glitter, as of rhinestones. Than
Mr. Sheridan, the owner of Drury Lane Thea-
tre, there was for thirty years no MsBcenas more
courted and conspicuous. True, he was over-
whelmed with lawsuits, he made it a business-
rule never to open a business-letter, and the
salaries of his actors and carpenters and multi-
tudinous employees were always long overdue.
But he catered unerringly to the popular taste,
and when there was any pressing need he could
always talk his bankers into another loan. At
Brooke's and Almack's there was no gamester
more determined, nor anyone more ready to
wager any sum on any hazard. Thus he wins
and loses fortunes overnight, and often has not
a shilling in his pocket Meanwhile, he lives in
splendor, ''as a statesman and a man of fashion
who 'set the pace' in all pastimes of the opulent
and idle": and the Prince-Begent is proud to
be seen with Mr. Sheridan, for this mounte-

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bank retained men's admiration as a vested
right » • • No one resists him, and nothing
daunts the fellow, not even when fire destroys
the theatre in which was invested every penny
of all the money he had borrowed To any other
man the loss would mean double ruin: but Mr.
Sheridan loiters in the Bedford Goffee-House
over the way, point-de-vice in every solitaire
and lace ruffle, smiling a little, and chatting
with the assembled pleasure-seekers there, as
he watches the flames; and he calls for liquid
refreshments, upon the plea, no longer consid-
ered valid, that a man may reasonably be per-
mitted to take a glass of wine by his own fireside.
• . . When misfortunes overwhelm him, as he
knows by experience, he somehow floats out of
the welter like a cork. This destruction of the
theatre thus means very little to him, who has
only to borrow a few more thousands of pounds,
and re-build. For he is always borrowing, with
the air of one performing an act of friendship.
The luckless tradesmen, it is related, call to
bully him into payment of long-standing debts,
and end by inducing him to accept a monetary
loan. A glib tongue and imperturbable self-
assurance are his equipments in battle with the
world : but he makes them serve, and prodigally.

215

BEYOND LIFE

And perhaps these weapons are as mnoh as
anybody really needs. . • .

Even with his wife they served prodigally.
Maria Sheridan lived nnder the spell of her
hnsband's bounce and glitter, through twenty-
one years of married life, and died adoring him.
'Twas a matter of large comment by the town
that Mr. Sheridan's grief was prodigiously edi-
fying: for in this, too, he somewhat outdid na-
ture. ... He was now a time-battered rake
nearing fifty, and bereft of his good looks by
dissipation, but still perfect in manner and ap-
parel and assurance. So he re-married, select-
ing, as a matter of course, the most prepossess-
ing young heiress of the day, — ^**the irresistible
Ogle,'' as she was toaste<^ — ^and winning the
Dean of Winchester's daughter amid circum-
stances which were sufficiently curious. . . •

Meanwhile in Parliament he encounters the
first orators of the time, and outtalks themu His
arraigimient of Warren Hastings, the im-
peached governor-general of India, is the sen-
sation of the age : at the conclusion of Mr. Sheri-
dan 's opening speech the House is adjourned,
so that the members can regain control of their
overwrought emotions. When he rises to con-
tinue, a seat in the visitors' gallery costs fifty

216

THE MOUNTEBANK

gaineas, and the gallery is f nlL Mr. Sheridan
spoke for three days, with what was everywhere
conceded to be unparalleled brilliancy. When
he had done, the lawyer who was there to defend
Hastings vehemently protested his client to be
a monster of iniquity. I do not expect you to
believe this, but it is a matter of record. The
great Pitt (who, mark you, very cordially de-
tested Mr. Sheridan) admits that ''this speech
surpassed all the eloquence of ancient or mod-
em times, and possessed everything that ^nius
or art could furnish to agitate and control the
human mind. ' ' Burke asserted the oration to be
''the most astonishing effort of eloquence, argu-
ment and wit united, of which there was any rec-
ord or tradition." And Fox declared that "all
he had ever heard, all he had ever read,
when compared with this speech, dwin-
dled into nothing, and vanished like va-
por before the sim." In short, there was
never such a Parliamentary triumph. . • • And
of course these invectives against Hastings
(whose main crime lay in being a Tory) were
claptrap of quite astounding commonplaceness,
as any man can see for himself who cares to
endure the tedium of reading these speeches;
but they dazzled all England, and served the

217

BEYOND LIFE

monntebank's turn to admiratioiL He becomes
secretary of foreign affairs, secretary of the
treasury, treasurer of the navy, and so on, hold-
ing office after office, and purchasing every ad-
vancement with pinchbeck oratory. Before each
speech it was his custom to drink a pint of
brandy ' * neat ' ' But there was no resisting Mr.
Sheridan, not even when he was sober. . . .
From beginning to end, his career is an extrava-
ganza such as no thoughtful artist would care
to perpetrate : and you cannot but feel that in
producing him life laid too onerous a strain
upon belief.

Thus far the drama has sped so trippingly
that one rather boggles over the last act . . .
It would appear that life was fumbling at some
lugubrious moral If not as apologue, how
else are we to interpret this bloated old SUenus,
this derelict who has outlived alike his health,
his income, his friends, his talents, and his repu-
tation? By retaining the Prince-Begent's
friendship he might have lived to the last in
that continuous rhinestone glitter. But Wales
wanted help just then in the matter of securing
his divorce. "Sir,'' said Mr. Sheridan, ''I never
take part against a woman,''— and with that
flourish went to his ruin gallantly. .. . Yet this
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THE MOUNTEBANK

sadden eclipse of Sheridan, with its brief and
painful sequel, was not sesfhetioally allowable:
it was bad art: and the comedy straggled out
into an intolerable fiasco when the greatest wit
in Europe, and probably the most polished
mountebank therein, became so broken-spirited
that he wept at a compliment and grew pale at
the sight of a constable. . . . Dukes and mar-
quises bore his coffin to Westminster Abbey,
and they buried him with princely honors : but
he died an imbecile, happily unconscious that
the sheriff's officer was threatening to drag him
off, in the blankets, to the debtors' prison. . • .
Yes, it must be that life was fumbling at a
moral, of just that explicit sort which every
writer worth his salt knows to be unforgivably
artifidaL . • •

Meanwhile, from a variety of standpoints, it
is salutary to consider Sheridan's career. As
an instance of life's not quite successful pla-
giarism from literature, it has been discussed
sufficiently. But moreover, I would have you
mark that for the thirty-two years he adorned
Parliament this mountebank was taken quite

219

BEYOND LIFB

seriously, and without any harm coming thereof.
He was very often too dnmk to walk, but as
secretary of foreign affairs he guided a nation
acceptably. He was never within sight of pay-
ing his debts, or even of guessing what they
might amount to, so the Coalition ministry
made him secretary of the treasury. And fin-
ally, at a period when Britannia, as a circum-
stcmce of considerable choric notoriety, ruled
the waves, he who was equally ignorant of
finance and maritime matters was treasurer of
the navy. Sheridan was as profoundly and it
would seem as obviously unqualified as diction-
aries could well express to fill any of the offices
given him: and he discharged their duties per-
fectly. Had he died at sixty his career would
have been the most immoral chapter in recorded
history: and it is solely by virtue of his injudi-
dousness in living three years longer that repu-
table persons are to-day enabled to face this
mountebank's continuous success. . . . His
secret merely was to pretend to be what seemed
expected. And for divers reasons nobody ever
exposed him. . . .

I shall digress into plain egotism. The initial
indiscretion of my life made me the youngest of
a large family, and, while I have sunk to author-

220

THE MOUNTEBANK

ship, my step-brothers and sisters have turned
out remarkably well. They are responsible
citizens, authorities on business and the stock-
market and cognate riddles, eminent in local
politics, leaders in education, and one of them
is a much admired clergyman whose eloquence
soars fearlessly to the loftiest platitudes. Yet
as a matter of fact, I know they are still the
children with whom I used to play in a brick-
paved backyard, about and under a huge cat-
alpa tree. . . . Each has come by an official
manner, like a grave mask in which to earn
bread and butter, and otherwise further the
wearer's desires: this laid aside, in family
gatherings, you will find that each displays as to
iany matter outside of his recognized vocation
very little interest and no ideas whatever. At
most, in regard to the rest of life each of my
brothers and sisters cherishes a handful of erro-
neous catchwords acquired by tenth-hand hear-
say. . . . For mentally they have developed
hardly at all : they are those cMldren with whom
I used to play, incarcerated in matured bodies,
as I perceive to my daily astonishment: and the
world at large permits these children to meddle
with its important causes and its cash and its
spiritual welfare. • . . In fact, they are en-

221

BEYOND LIFE

couraged to do so: and like Sheridan, they ap-
pear somehow to meet the responsibility in a
perfectly adequate fashion. For they pass as
models of acumen and reliability: and only by
accident do I know that when my serious-
minded kindred look most imposing they are
meditating trivialities or else not thinking about
anything at alL • • • Do I appear to accuse
them of stupidity? Well, I confess I have
heard my preacher-brother publicly assert that
war was the final method of proving, not which
side had the stronger army, but that we were
right : and my banker-brother once informed me
it was a striking proof of God's kindness that
He had given all the larger seaports excellent
harbors. When voiced by one's own flesh, such
imbecilities wake self-distrust And yet, I can-
not but admiringly recognize that my kindred
are persons of exceptional success in the prac-
tical affairs of life, as these matters are con-
ducted. For my kindred very convincingly pre-
tend to be what seems expected. . • •

And to me who wonder at the irrationality of
all this, to me also, life has been an interminable

222

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effort to pretend to be what seemed expected.
I know quite well at bottom that I too have very
little ohanged from what I was in boyhood,
when for any say in matters of import I was
conoededly nnfit. Bnt there is no arguing with
the looking-glass, and it displays a rather sa-
gacious-seeming person. • • • None the less,
the outcome is really too preposterous that I
should have acquired a house and a bank-ac-
count, a wife and children, and a variety of oth-
er valuables that ought to be entrusted only to
responsible people. And when I think of the
ignorance and incapacity I daily endeavor to
conceal, and all the baseless pretensions and
unreal interests I affect hourly, it appals me to
reflect that very possibly everyone else conducts
affairs on a not dissimilar plan. For I have
suffered as yet no open detection. The neigh-
bors seem to accept me quite gravely as the
head of a family: the chauffeur touches his cap
and calls me ''sir": publishers bring out my
books: and my wife fair-mindedly discusses
with me all our differences of opinion, so that
we may without any bitterness reach the com-
promise of doing what she originally suggested.
I even serve on juries, and have a say in whether
or no a full-grown man shall go to jaiL . . .

223

BEYOND LIFE

Some day, I think, this playing at responsi-
bility will be ended In some nngaessable fash-
ion the years will be tnmed back, and I shall be
nineteen or thereabouts concededly, and shall no
longer be disguised by scanty hair and wrinkled
flesh and this interminable need of pretending
to be a noteworthy and grave person. At the
bottom of my heart I know that the trappings of
a staid citizen have been given me through some
mistake, — ^his house and wife and motors and
farm-lands and table-silver, and his graying
moustache and rheumatic twinges and impaired
digestion, and his mannerisms and little digni-
ties and continual small fussy obligations, — ^and
that the error will have to be set right. These
things are alien to me : and instinctively I know
that my association with them is temporary.
And so it will be managed somehow that these
things will pass from me, as a piled doud-heap
passes, and I shall enter again into a certain
garden, and find therein a girl whom I and one
aging woman alone remember. It is toward
that meeting all things move, quite irresistibly,
and all life turns as a vast wheel, so very slowly,
till time has come full-circle through this stupe-
fying mist of common-sense and even more com-
mon prejudice. For life, if life means anything,

224

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mast aim toward realities: and that girl and
boy, and that garden and their doings therein,
were more important and more real to me, as I
know now, than things have been since then.
. • . Nothing, indeed, that happens after nine-
teen or thereabouts can ever be accepted as quite
real, because the person to whom it happens can
no longer meet it frankly. There is no thorough
contact between the event and his flinching wary
senses. For always the need of judicious reser-
vation, the feeling of amenability to what is ex-
pected of you, and in fine the obligation of being
a mountebank, conspire to prevent entire sur-
render to reality: and there is a prescribed eti-
quette, of which some underthought is more or
less potent in all we say or do. At times, indeed,
this etiquette controls us absolutely, as in mat-
ters of personal honor or in love-making, so that
we recite set phrases and move as puppets. Thus
we worry graveward, with the engagement of
but a part of our faculties : and we no longer
participate in life with all our being.

So it is that the accepted routine of life's con-
duct tends to make mountebanks of us inevit-

225

BEYOND LIFE

ably : and the laborious years weave small hypo-
crisies like cobwebs about our every action, and
at last about our every thought The one con-
soling feature is that we are so incessantly
busied at concealment of our personal ignorance
and incapacity as to lack time to detect one an-
other. For we are all about that arduous task:
at every moment of our lives we who are civil-
ized persons must regard, if we indeed do not
submit to be controlled by, that which is ex-
pected of us : and we are harassed always by an
instant need of mimicking the natural behavior
of men as, according to our generally received if
erroneous standards, ' 'men ought to be. ' ' It all
reverts, you observe, to the SBsthetic canons of
Sophocles. • . . And not the least remarkable
part of the astounding business is that this
continuous pretending by everybody appears to
answer fairly weU. It passes the pragmatic
test : it works, and upon the whole it works with-
out bringing about intolerable disaster. . . .
Yet it is interesting to observe the unaccount-
ability of many of these conformances to what
is expected, and to wonder if, as I have sug-
gested, our standards may by any chance be
here and there erroneous. I am often surprised
by what does seem expected of us, through the

226

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entire irrelevance of the thing indicated to our
formula for expressing it. * . .

For instance, I am expected to amuse myself.
One way of doing this is to preface my pleasure-
seeking by putting on, among other habiliments,
a cuirass of starched linen, — a stubborn and
exacerbating garment, with no conceivable pal-
liation, — and a funereal-hued coat, with elon-
gated tails, of which the only use is to prevent
my sitting down with comfort. Thus calami-
tously equipped, I set forth unabashed by the
gaze of heaven's stars, to an uncarpeted room
where a band is playing, place my right hand
toward the small of a woman's back, — ^who has
bared her arms and shoulders in preparation
for the ceremony, — ^hold her left hand in mine,
and in this posture escort her around the room,
not once but time after time. At intervals a
reputable lawyer, under no suspicions as to his
sanity, blows a diil^'s whistle, and the woman
and I, with others, take part in a sort of mili-
tary drill. After I have repeated this process,
over and over again, with several women, all of
us go into another room and eat a variety of
indigestible things within an allotted time,
somewhat as though we were lunching at one
of those rural railway stations where the pas-

227

BEYOND LIFS

iengen forage for saodwidies and pie and
dudumwliik the tram waits reatiF^. Wethen
return to the first apartment^ and p roeeed with
the original form of evofaitiona until several
hoon of jet another calendar day are diqpoaed
of. . . . There is no great harm in aU this,
and in f aet, the physical exerdse involved may
be mildly beneficial, if not offset by indigestion.
The impenetrable mystery remains, thon^
how the cotillion, or dancing in any form, came
to be employed as an arbitrary symbol for
amusement* . . . But, indeed, now that we
elderly people are no longer encouraged to be-
come mildly intoxicated at all social gatherings,
I am afraid the truth is being forced upon us
that man, after age has bred discernment, can
got but little delight from the company of his
fellows when in his sober senses. • • •

Or put it that I am expected to evince my
religious faith. I must set about this by put-
ting on my best raiment,— for, again like chil-
dren, we need must ''dress up'' for everything
we ''play at/* — and by going into a building, of
which the roof is indecorously adorned with a
tall phallic symbol, and by remaining there for
an hour and a half. There too we perform a
drill, of standing, sitting and kneeling, and we

228

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read and sing archaic observations from little
books. Sometimes the formols we repeat are
not imastomiding, as when we gravely desider-
ate the privilege of dipping our feet in the blood
of our enemies, or even request that our adver-
saries be forthwith carried alive into helL An
honest gentleman, whose conduct upon week-
days I cordially revere, emerges from the ves-
try, in what to ^e unsophisticated might appear
to be a collocation of the fragments of a black
bathrobe and of a nightgown ; and after forbid-
ding us to worship stone images (which really
does seem rather a superlSuous exhortation) an-
nounces that the Neighborhood League will meet
on Monday evening, and devotes some twenty
minutes to revising one or another well-meant
utterance of Christ into conformity with more
modem ideas. Then plates are passed, into
which we put envelopes containing money, to
pay for the heating, lighting and general up-
keep of the building, and the living expenses of
the clergyman and the janitor. Now all this is
likewise more or less harmless, yet, sanely
viewed, it is difficult to connect in any way with
religion. • • .

But the tale of our grave-faced antics is in-
terminable. ... I meet So-and-so, and we in-

239

BEYOND LIFE

quire simultaneously, **How do you dot" with-
out either of us giving or expecting an answer.
We shake hands^ for the perhaps inadequate
reason that several centuries ago people did
this to show that neither of them was carrying
a knife. And thereupon we babble of topics
concerning which both know the verdict of either
to be valueless, such as the lessening supply of
good servants and the increasing cost of food, or
the probability of rain and what our wives are
planning to do. And I find myself advancing
opinions I never thought of holding, just to
make conversation to which neither of us pays
any particular attention. I find myself gravely
expounding what I remember paying for shoes,
and from what direction storms usually ap-
proach our house, and our reasons for spending
the summer in one place rather than another,
quite as if these were matters about which my
hapless listener might conceivably want to
know. What curse is come upon me, I marvel
inly, that I must discourse such nonsense f and
why, in heaven's name, should this man be tell-
ing me about his automobile and what he said to
the butler t Then, when we say * * good-bye, ' * we
sedately invoke in that contracted form the
guardianship of Omnipotence for each other.

230

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. • . The transaction throughout is automatic,
for of course we do not actually think of what
we are in point of fact saying and doing : and
indeed the majority of us appear to^get through
life quite comfortably without thinking at alL
For consider how very generally we believe
that we — ^who have eyes, too, — are a race of
^' white" persons; and that the promises of the
Marriage Ceremony are such as may be made
rationally; and that it is a mfttter of course ar-
rangement to pay taxes for the privilege of re-
taining what confessedly belongs to you; and
that it preserves justice to execute a murderer,
on the principle that two homicides constitute
a maintenance of what one of them upsets; and
that it is humorous to mention certain towns,
such as Oshkosh or Kankakee, and is somehow
an excellent joke on anyone to have a baby or a
mother-in-law: so that, in fine, we are guided
in well-nigh every transaction in life by axioms
and presumptions which have not even the lean
merit of sounding plausible. • • .

But it is not merely that our private lives
are given over to mentsd anarchy. . . . We live

231

BEYOND LIFE

under a government which purports to be based,
actaally, on the assumption that one man is as
good as another. No human being believes this
assumption to be true, of course, nor could any
form of polity that took it seriously survive a
week: but the imposing statement serves well
enough as the ostensible cornerstone of demo-
cracy. And we must all regard the laws of this
government, since to one or another of these
laws must be amenable every action of our lives.
Thus you may well spare time to visit a legis-
lative body in session, and to listen to the de-
bates, and to conjecture whether each partici-
pant is really an imbecile or for ulterior ends is
consciously making a spectacle of himself. How-
ever, it may be an excess of modesty which in-
duces the self-evident belief of every public
speaker that the persons who have assembled
to hear him cannot possibly be intelligent. And
if you will attend a State Legislature, in parti-
cular, and look about you, and listen for a while,
and reflect that those preposterous people are
actually making and unmaking laws by which
your physical life is ordered, you will get food
for wonder and some perturbation. But of
course, poor creatures, they too are trying to do
what seems expected of them, very much as

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Sheridan attacked Warren Hastings : and many
of the most applauded public speakers conserve
an appreciable degree of intelligence for private
life.

When you consider that presidents and chief*
justices and archbishops and kings and states-
men are human beings like you and me and the
state legislators and the laundryman, the
thought becomes too horrible for humanity to
face. Soy here too, romance intervenes promptly,
to build up a mythos about each of our promi-
nent men, — ^about his wisdom and subtlety and
bravery and eloquence, and including usually
his Gargantuan exploits in lechery and drunken-
ness, — so as to save us from the driveling terror
that would spring from conceding our destinies
in any way to depend on other beings quite as
mediocre and incompetent as ourselves. . • •

Yet perfection graces few human subterfuges.
Thus very often does the need arise for romance
to preserve us yet further, from discovering
that this protective talk of ^'statesmanship''
and '^ policies'' is nonsense clamorously ex-
ploded. For sometimes nations oome to fisti-

233

BEYOND LIFE

cuffs, just as inconsequently as the plumber and
the baker might do, and the neighbors take part,
very much as a street-row intensifieSi until a
considerable section of the world is devastated.
Then romance prompts us, in self -protection, to
moralize of one or the other side's ** aims'' and
^^plottings'' and '^schemes,'' and so on, as the
provokers of all this ruin, rather than acknowl-
edge the causes to lie disconcertingly deeper,
and to be rooted in our general human incom-
petence, and in our lack of any especial designs
whatever. . . . Never at any time is man in
direr need of disregarding men as they are,
than under the disastrous illumination of war :
for then actually to face the truth would forth-
with drive anyone of us insane. We are then
all shuddering through a disrupted Vanity Fair
of mountebanks who have come to open and ig-
nominous failure : and our sole hope of salva-
tion lies in pretending not to notice. For it
sometimes happens that among these so cruelly
exposed mountebanks are our own chosen over-
lords, chosen as such, for the most part, on ac-
count of their real superiority to the run of
men : and when this happens, the more perspica-
cious among us prefer not to recognize our over-
lords ' incompetence, because we Imow that these

234

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pathetio muddlers and blusterers represent,
upon the whole, the best our raoe is yet able to
produce. • • •

So it is rather sad when war breaks out, and
honored subterfuges unaccountably collapse.
Everyone was letter-perfect in what seemed ex-
pected of him under the old order: but when
that is upset overnight, and there are no stand-
ards to conform to, nobody anywhere has any
notion what to do. It breeds a seizure of dimib
panic which is unbearable. So— kings and cab-
inets and generalissimos being at a nonplus, and
even presidents (in Mexico and other Southern
republics) falling a shade short of omniscience,
— the nations flounder, and gabble catchwords,
and drift, and strike out blindly, and tergiver-
sate, and jostle one another, and tell frantic
falsehoods, and hit back, like fretful children;
and finally one by one fling aside the last tram-
meling vestige of reason and self-control, and
go screaming mad (with a decided sense of re-
lief) in order to get rid of the strain. And so
spreads steadily the holocaust. . . .

Yes, it is rather sad, because you cannot but
suspect that whatever befalls a race of such at-
tested incompetence cannot very greatly matter
if the universe be conducted on any serious

235

BEYOND LIFE

basis. Yet even in war-time men worry along
somehow, desperately endeavoring still to live
up to notions derived from romantic fiction,
such as is provided by pnblic speakers and
newspaper editorials and the censored war-
news, — ^and liberally ascribing ^'plans'' and
** policies'' to every accident of the carnage, and
revising these explanations as often as seems
expedient We play, in fine, that himaan intelli-
gence somewhere either has the situation in
hand or at least foresees a plausible way out of
it. We are thus never actually reduced to fac-
ing the truth : for however near we may blunder
to the verge of such disaster, the demiurge pro-
tects us by means of that high ansBsthesia which
we term ** patriotism."

Now patriotism is, of course, something
more than a parade of prejudice, so flimsy that
even at the height of its vogue, in war-time,
anyone of us can see the folly, and indeed the
wickedness, of such patriotism as is manifested
by the other side. For with our own country's
entry into war, it is generally conceded that,
whe^er for right or wrong and in default of any

236

THE MOUNTEBANK

coherent ezplanation by our overlords as to
what we are doing in that fighting galley, we can
all agree to stand together in defence of our na-
tionfd honor. In large part, this is another case
of doing what seems to be expected: and the
vast majority of us begin by being patriotically
bellicose in speech out of respect to our neigh-
bor's presumed opinion, while he returns the
courtesy. So we both come at last unf eignedly
to believe what we are saying, just as men al-
ways find conviction in repetition : and a bene-
volent wave of irrationality sweeps over towns
and cross-roads, with the most staid of us upon
its crest excitedly throwing tea into Boston Har-
bor, or burning effigies of Lincohi and Davis
(severally, as taste directs), or trampling upon
Spanish flags, and organizing parades and pass-
ing resolutions, and even attempting to memo-
rize our national air. • . . Doubtless, aU this
is grotesque, upon the surface, and is of no es-
pecial use in settling the war : but it prevents us
from thinking too constantly of the fact that we
are sending our boys to death. . . . The demi-
urge, in fine, to soothe bewilderment and panic
administers patriotism as an ansBsthetic. And
as has been pointed out, elsewhere, we find that
ardent patriotism can even be made to serve as

237

BEYOND LIFE

an exhilarating substitute for lukewarm reli-
gion whenever the two happen to be irrecon-
cilable. . . . Each war, in short, with its at*
tendant outlets for new energies, arouses a fine
if not quite explicable general sense of doing
something of real importance, in all save the
emotionally abstemious, to whom any war must
perforce appear in its inception a gloomy error,
and in its manifestations a nuisance.

And probably these thin-blooded people are
wrong. -aSsthetically, at any rate, there is a
deal to be said in favor of patriotism, and of
this quaint-seeming faith in the especial merits
of one's own country and in all the curious cus-
toms of one's country, however inexplicable,
even though this faith occasionally convert
Earth into a revolving shambles. For patriot-
ism is, of course, not merely an ansBsthetic: to
the contrary, it is, like aU the other magnani-
mous factors in human life, a dynamic product
of the demiurge. Thus patriotism (as Paul
Vanderhoffen has put it) can ascend to lofty
heights without depending upon logic to give it
a leg up. To prefer your country's welfare to
your own is rational enough, since it is but to
assume that the whole is greater than the part :
but when we proceed to prefer our country's

238

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welfare to that of any and all other countries in
the worlds — as we unanimously do, with the
glowing approval of consdencei — ^we must pro-
gress by high-mindedly reversing the original
assumption. So that patriotism is undeffled by
any smirch of "realism" or of that which is
merely *' logical," — and must always be kept
thus in order to stay vigorous, since patriotism
is a product, and one of the most generally com-
mended products, of the demiurge.

And I, for one, find nothing unreasonable in
the irrationality of patriotism. . . . The other
animals munch grass and paw at unconsidered
dirt, where man not aU unconsciously gets nour-
ishment from his mother's bosom. For we know
ourselves to be bom of that coign of Earth we
cherish with no inexplicable affection. Not only
in spirit does our habitat conform us, since the
land we love, that soil whereon our cattle graze,
goes steadily to the making of plants, and thence
becomes incarnate in our bodies : until we our-
selves seem but a many agglutinate and ani-
mated particles of that land we love, with such
partiality as we may not rouse toward those
cool abstractions, equity and logic, but reserve
for our corporal kin. ^us patriots may ration-
ally justify the direst transports of their ac-

239

BEYOND LIFE

tionsi if not the wisdom of their public utter-
ances. For in battling for the honor of one's
birthplace each hand is lifted in defence, not
merely of opinions, but of the very field in
which it once was dust : and he that is slain does
but repay through burial a loan from his
mother. So it is with actual and very profound
reason that we are not reasonable about the
display of our patriotism: for no man, of what-
ever nationality, is called on to be reasonable
where his mother's welfare appears concerned
or, to however small degree, her honor seems
impugned. In such a quandary he strikes. The
merits of his cause he will defer for later con-
sideration. And meanwhile wisdom and phil-
osophy may speak with the tongue of angels,
and be hanged to them : for the noble madness
of patriotism pleads at quite another tribunal,
and addresses the human heart, whereover nei-
ther ear nor brain has jurisdiction. Our mother
seems to be molested; and we strike to requite
all those who trouble her, no matter what be
their excuse. That only is the immediate es-
sential: long afterward, when there is nothing
better to do, we may spare time to reason.
Meanwhile we know that, here also, the romance
is of more instant worth than the mere fact.

240

vni

THE CONTEMPORARY

241

— ThiB Diflfaiterefted Loaa and Life Aasiinaiee ib
rathior a capital eoncem, David.

— Capital, indeed I — ^in one sense.

— ^In the only important one — whieh is number oneiy
DaTid.

— ^What will be the paid np eapital, aeeording to jrour
next prospectus f

— ^A figure of two, and as many oughts after it as
the printer can get into the same line. . . .

— WfUlf upon my soul, you are a genius then.

---Life and AdveniureM of Martin Ckwulmoii

242

Which Concerns the
Contemporary

So it is in physical life that romanbe, when
things go hopelessly wrong, without fail
affords to mortals some makeshift whereby
to preserve their self-esteem. • • . • And that
brings me to another topic which has long been
in the back of my mind^-that other way in which
romance may deal with actually present condi-
tions, and make something more or less worth-
while of them, by transplantation in the field of
literature. I have spoken, at some length, as to
how creative writers came against their in-
stincts to prevaricate about contemporary life,
in concession to their patrons' mental indo-
lence : and to the drawbacks and pitfalls of this
proceeding I have alluded Past doubt, it is in-
finitely safer to adhere to the Hellenic method
of evoking protagonists worth noble handling
from the bright mists of antiquity, where-
through, as far as go existent proofs, men may
in reality have moved ^^as they ought to be.**

243

BETOND LIFE

That, however, is very far from saying that
fine literature does not ever deal with the con-
temporaneous. Were there nothing else, no-
body could advance such an insane statement in
English without forthwith incurring a liability
of having hurled at his head the Complete
Works of Charles Dickens. • • •

Yes, I know that, after so many others, to
speak of Dickens is to squander breath, and to
write of him is to waste good ink and paper. In-
deed, for that matter, numerous cognoscenti
will assure you publishers do likewise when
they print his novels. For as literature, the
man's effusions are no longer taken very seri-
ously by the lecturers before Women's Clubs.
The deuce of it is that, both colloquially and
mentally, he stays the ancestor of all of us : and,
like helpless victims of heredity, we must con-
tinue to repeat his phrases for lack of any ade-
quate synonym, and our really popular fiction
seems condemned to haunt the levels of his
Christmas Carol philosophy.

Yet, as always, there is another side. ''The
custom of ancestor worship,'' as Horace Cal-
verley somewhere observes, ''has long bem a

244

THE CONTEMPOBABY

less potent fetish in the Kingdom of China than
in the Republic of Letters/' And, true enough,
it was for a great while the wont of our general
dunderheadedness to speak well of dead writers
and decry all living authors, with the reassuring
consciousness that thus no possible benefit could
be incurred by anybody. There is even now a
vast deal of respectability in Death: and he re-
mains Eing-at-Arms in the literary world,
wherein no title of nobility is assured until his
seal lias been affixed. ''Death is the great as-
sayer of the sterling ore of talent At his touch
the drossy particles fall off, — ^the irritable, the
personal, the gross, — ^and mingle with the dust:
the finer and more ethereal part mounts with
the winged spirit to watch over our latest mem-
ory, and to protect our bones from insult. Death
is a sort of natural canonization. It makes the
meanest of us sacred: it installs the poet in his
immortality, and lifts him to the skies.'' • . •
So wrote Hazlitt, in preparation for a volte-
face dictated by that custom which makes bod-
ily interment a condition of literary pre-emi-
nence : and to the considerate even such fame as
fills several pages in the encydopasdia, and a
half-shelf in the library, seems purchased on
quaint terms. . • •

245

BEYOND LIFE

But the present stays not always tamely sub-
servient to the past; so that to become a ^'clas-
sic" is no assurance of perpetuity in the estate.
Especially of late years has appraisal of our
ancestors' ignorance in regard to aeroplanes
and biology and suflTrage^ and motors and Pro-
hibition and germs and the electric chair, begot-
ten by analogy distrust of their clear-sighted-
ness in all directions; and old literary values
have borne up ill under their re-testing by the
twentieth century, with that cocksureness pecu-
liar to youngsters under twenty. The "person-
al reaction,'* in fine, has not been uniformly sat-
isfactory; and as a consequence, pretty much
everybody knows nowadays that the name of no
novelist should be spoken with reverence if you
are quite certain of its pronunciation; and that
the correct verdict as to Dickens, at all events,

should waver delicately between a yawn and a
shrug.

When thus by so many persons no more seri-
ously regarded than an obituary notice, the
reputation of Dickens is in perilous plight Con-
fessed inability to read his novels is even re-
garded as incommunicably smacking of literary
knowingness. His characters are mere personi-
fications of certain qualities- His books present
246

THE CONTEMPOBABY

false pictures of life. And above all, he is that
unforgivable monster, a Victorian. . . . So the
tale goes, with blithe unconsciousness that these
arraignments do but, in point of fact, sum up
the reasons why his books will always delight
the judicious.

Few persons not already under restraint
would care to deny that Dickens unfailingly mis*
represented the life he pretended to portray.
To do this was, as I have shown, alike a requi-
site of art and of altruism: so the wise praise
him therefor, knowing his merits to hinge far
less on whether or no he has falsified the truth
than on the delectable manner in which he has
prevaricated. A novel, or indeed any work of
art, is not intended to be a transcript from na-
ture, pace all that cheerless reading-matter
which our ^^ realists'' concoct for the agents of
the Society for the Suppression of Vice. Truth,
once hoisted from her well in primal nakedness,
must like any other human failing be judiciously
dressed in order to make an acceptable appear-
ance in the library.

You might reasonably refrain from the noble
pleasure of praising in discussion of a neigh-

247

BEYOND LIFE

bor's intellectual clarity if he ranked diamonds
and charcoal as of equivalent worth, on the
ground that both are composed of carbon. Yet
radically, such confusion would be no more
egregious than that made by the creative writer
who mingles the observed truth and his private
inventions, with very little more discrimination
than is exercised in such blending by a prose-
cuting attorney. ** Realists '* gravely contend
that their books are true to what they see in
life. It is consoling to deduce, from the com-
parative infrequency of suicide, that the ma-
jority of mankind view life otherwise. And yet,
in such novels a naive veracity is sometimes,
beyond doubt, confusedly to be discerned among
a multitude of other SBsthetic offences. . • .
For of course the mere fact of a thing's hap-
pening in nature does not affect in one way or
another its right to happen in a novel: and
to proclaim that ^'All this is truth'' is
really on a par with observing ''All this
is carbon." It should be the part of the
creative writer skilfully to make a selection
from the truths in regard to his sub-
ject, rather than to foist them wholesale into a
transient grant of electrotype. Facts which are
not to his purpose he is at liberty to omit, or to

248

THE CONTEMPOBABY

color, or at a pinch to deny. He most, in short,
create unhampered, and shape his petty nni-
verse with the fine freedom of omnipotence. The
truth therein must be whatever he wills to be
the truth, and not a whit more or less : and his
observation of actual life is an account on which
he ought, at most, to draw small cheques to tide
him over di£Bieulties.

For the creative artist must remember that
his book is structurally different from life, in
that, were there nothing else, his book begins
and ends at a definite point, whereas the canons
of heredity and religion forbid us to believe that
life can eyer do anything of the sort He must
remember that his art traces in ancestry from
the tribal huntsman telling tales about the cave-
fire; and so, strives to emulate not human life,
but human speech, with its natural elisions and
falsifications. He must remember, too, that his
one concern with the one all-prevalent truth in
normal existence is jealously to exclude it from
his book. . . • For '^living'Ms to be conscious
of an incessant series of less than momentary
sensations, of about equal poignancy, for the
most part, and of nearly equal unimportance.
Art attempts to marshal the shambling proces-
sion into trimness, to usurp the role of memory

249

BEYOND LIFE

and convention in assigning to some of these
sensations an especial prominence, and, in the
old phrase, to lend perspective to the forest we
cannot see because of the trees. Art, as long
ago observed my friend Mrs Kennaston, is an
expurgated edition of nature: at art's touch,
too, ^^the drossy particles fall off and mingle
with the dust ' ' And if Dickens has performed
his expurgation so as to improve on the original,
he is deserving of our gratitude.

To contest that Dickens has done this is futile.
He has painted a clear-cut picture of the sort
of world which he imagined he would like to in-
habit. Questionless, his England is contiguous
to Cloud-Guckoo-Land, and his Anglo-Saxons
intermarried with the Nepphelococcygians.
There was never anyone in human flesh so me-
ticulously enamored of le mot juste as Mr. Peck-
sniff, so prolific in weird modem instances as
the Wellers p^re et fils, nor so felicitously gar-
rulous as Mrs. Nickleby: yet this need not pre-
vent their being the best of company. As Dick-
ens has himself suggested — ^in his subtle depic-
tion of Mrs. Harris, which is quite in the method
of Henry James, — ^the non-existence of a person

250

THE CONTEMPOBABY

detracts not at all from the merits of his or her
conversation. The features of these people are
over-emphasized, as are those of any actor when
he treads the stage, and the performance is all
the better for it The characters of Mr. G^ieo-
dore Dreiser*, say, are more **true to life'' (in
one of the many fields wherein candor is a min-
ous virtue), and indeed can never be suppressed
into actual popularity. Tor few of us find liv-
ing of such uniform excellence and nobility as
to endear a rehearsal thereof in the library : and
the more honest are willing to confess that our
average associates, to whom business and con-
sanguinity link us willy-nilly, are sufficiently
depressing in the flesh to induce a whole-hearted
avoidance of their counterparts in fiction. . . .
And when it comes actually to reading time-
hallowed books, however rarely such hard ne-
cessity arises in America, there is no doubting
that most of us prefer the grotesqueries of Mi-
cawber and Swiveller and Winkle to a nodding
intimacy with Hamlet, or to an out-and-out nap
over Rohi/nson Crusoe, or to a vain dream of

*"FnuiU7 we liave little use for 'dunglim' literature^ in
which branch of ezpreesion Dreiser is a past master. The flavor
throu£^hout is hectie and unwholesome. It is not nice reading
for pure girls and high-minded women, nor yet for clean young
men." — Evening Journal, ^chmond, Va.

251

BEYOND LIFE

having moistened the arid stretches of Clarissa
Harlowe's correspondence with the tear of sen-
sibility: and this does not prove that Dickens
is superior in any way to Shakespeare or Defoe,
or even Richardson, but simply that the ma-
jority of ns find in Dickens less that is xmcon-
genial. Mr. Bumble is not, upon the whole, a
more masterfully portrayed character than Sir
John Falstaff : but Mr. Bumble is more gener-
ally familiar, and, quite naturally, finds a far
larger circle of sympathizers in his last stage, —
which, as you may remember, was not to babble
of green fields, but to be bullied by his wife.

And quaintly obsolete as it sounds, I am
afraid there are still surviving a few of us old
fogies who read Dickens with positive delight.
We even hunt up an excuse or two in palliation.
• • • For although the humor of Dickens may,
as ^6 are credibly informed, degenerate into
buffoonery, it has a provoking habit of making
people laugh. His pathos may, even to the ex-
tent of a stylistic scandal, be palpably forced,
but from uncritical eyes it has drawn at least a
Mediterraneau of salt water. So we old fogies
let detractors bay their uttermost: the moon
has spots on it, but it remains a creditable lu-
minary ; and it is a pitiable form of myopia, say

252

THE CONTEMPOBABY

we, that detects in a Belisarius only the holes
in his toga. Dickens very certainly has not de-
picted the real world in his writings, but therein
has made us free of an infinitely more pleasant
planet He has endowed virtuous folk with a
preternatural power of coming out of trouble
with flying colors and congenial spouses, but
the most rigid moralist cannot well quarrel with
this equipoise to delinquent actuality. He may
even have made all good women short and
plump and fair, and all misguided females
haughty and tall and dark: yet every artist has
his mannerisms, and if Dickens chooses to make
the possession of desirable traits a question of
height and complexion, there too he improves
upon unscrupulous life, which in these matters
seems to have no principle whatever. Besides,
in Dickens-Land the residents are entitled to
their local customs and racial idiosyncrasies and
patois and peculiar social standards, just as
much as are the inhabitants of Austria and
Abyssinia and Arden. . . . Somewhat in this
f adiion run the excuses of us frivolous old fo-
gies, who are a little too old to regard men and
men's doings, even upon platforms, very seri-
ously; and have lived through so many trials
and responsibilities that those which remain to

253

BEYOND LIFE

be encountered appear comparatively neglig-
ible, and much grave talk about them seems
silly.

Of course, all this is ^ inartistic": it is the
sort of conduct that grieved Flaubert, and con-
tinues to upset the sensibility of Mr. George
Moore, as earnest-minded persons stand ready
to protest in columns. For Dickens very often
shocks the young by his lack of interest in sex-
ual irregularities. Yet Dickens probably knew
even more about novel-writing than do such sa-
gacious folk as lecture and publish without gen-
eral detection. No doubt he has his quirks and
whimsies, which are common to the despot of
any country: but we who love him are fain to
believe that the king can do no wrong. . • .
Perhaps that is begging the question: but then
it is a question which should liever have been
raised. And if you can seriously debate '^Is
Dickens obsolete?'^ already, in so far as you
are concerned, he is as obsolete as youth and
ApriL For you have outgrown a novelist who
** wallows naked in the pathetic," and is some-
times guilty of a vulgar sort of humor that
makes people laugh, which, as we now know, is
not the purpose of humor. . . . Indeed, to
many persons not Torquemada or the Four

254

THE CONTEMPORAEY

Evangelists can appear more remote in their
way of thinking than does this novelist who
shapes his plots with the long arm of coinci-
dence, and never flies in the admiring foolish
face of convention. For it depresses the con-
ventionally ** advanced" to see the man deal so
liberally in cheerfulness: and they resent his
happy-go-lucky methods of creating characters
that seem more real to the judicious than the
people we sit beside in streetcars, and (upon the
whole) more vital and worthy of consideration
than the folk who * * cannot read Dickens. ' ' For
Dickens regarded life from the viewpoint of a
now unmodish optimism. . .

That reminds me of the remark by ordinary
made as to Dickens which would be more pat-
ently absurd had not usage toned its lurid idiocy
to the drab of commonplace. **No, I don't care
for Dickens: I prefer Thackeray.'* To the
philosophic mind it would seem equally sensi-
ble to decline to participate in a game of bil-
liards on the ground that one was fond of her-
ring. No considerate admirer of the dignified
character of the ancient Britons will feel it a
matter of absolute duty to paint himself blue.

255

BEYOND LIFE

Caractacus and Boadicea were no doubt as es-
timable in conduct as in costume they were fru-
gal: the police anywhere may reasonably con-
cede both circumstances without adding a per-
mit to dispense with further patronage of the
tailor: and very much as it is possible thus to
render homage to moral excellence without the
ascription of sartorial inf aUibility^ so may you
admire a manner of writing without belittling
another man's way of clothing his thoughts.
When an author offers us a good piece of work,
it is folly to begrudge acknowledgement because
another writer has done as well, or even better.
Lovers of tolerably intelligent literature must
take what they can come by, in a world which to
them has never been over-generous.

But English-speaking races appear somehow
called upon to uphold one of these writers at
the expense of the other. Beside this disputa-
tion, the Himdred Years War was an affair of
no moment G^ie combatants will have none of
the watchman crying in our mental night, no
matter how wisely Master Dogberry proclaims
comparisons to be odorous: and there is only a
small party of lawless renegades who think the
verbose Sicilian in the right, — ^and so turn to
the folk at Castlewood when Oliver Twist grows

256

THE CONTEMPOBABY

rhetorical, and seek the company of Mrs. Gamp
when the moralizing becomes prolix in and
about Oreat Oannt Street

And it would be very pleasant, did time serve,
to prattle about Thackeray, too, and his equally
ingenious travesty of every day life for artistic
purposes. But Thackeray, when you come to
think of it, did his best work precisely when ho
was not dealing with contemporary life, and
Esmond scores tremendously for the Hellenic
method. . . . Yet it must be noted that Thack-
eray also improved upon what was merely
plausible, and in very much the pertinacious
manner of Dickens, clung to a favorite cliche
which delights us in chief by reason of its anti-
quity. With Dickens there was always ^*the
comic countryman who overheard everything, *'
and came forward toward the end of the twen-
tieth monthly number to unmask the evil-doer:
in book after book this accident is unblushingly
tendered as a panacea for every human ill. With
Thackeray there was always the unsuspected
document lying perdu against its revealment or
destruction, as might best serve virtue, in the
twentieth monthly number, — ^whether as lieu-
tenant Osborne's injudicious letter to Mrs.
Crawley, or as the will of Sophia Newcome or

257

BEYOND LIFE

of Lord Bingwood, or Henry Esmond's birth-
certificate, or the Warringtons' deed to Gastle-
wood-in- Virginia. Thackeray is really not
happy unless he has some such chirographic
bombshell to explode in the last chapter. And
in Pendennis you will find this omnipresent
document assuming the droll form of the tattoo-
ing on Amory's arm: but here too Thackeray's
obsessing cliche provides the happy winding-up
of affairs. . . . No, I shall not insult you by
pointing out that everybody's welfare does not
thus quite invariably, and unanimously, pivot
upon a bit of paper or an eavesdropper. But
do you not perceive that these writers faithfully
copied life in life's most important teaching, by
inculcating that for persons who honor the es-
thetic conventions of "good" and "evil" a
happy ending impends and is inevitable,
through however unlikely means? For the dy-
namic illusion of optimism is very thriftily fos-
tered by romance in the wisest, and in the wise
alone.

All in all, there is really no disputing that
these two great optimists succeeded in writing
delightfully about their contemporaries by the

258

THE CONTEMPORARY

simple device of not telling the truth. . . .
Probably few men of striking literary talent
have ever been so constituted as to be capable
of aetnaUy noticing what contemporary life was
like. The absent-mindedness of gifted writers
iSy indeed, notorious: and it would seem to be
this habit of not closely observing their fellow
creatures which enables men of genius to write
about them so charmingly. At all events, once
the writing is adopted as a profession, the
author has definitely cut adrift from normal
life; and before long will forget its ordinary
course so completely that he may very well
come to misrepresent it in a masterpiece. . . .
Balzac, who was more profoundly painstaking
than most of us, adopted the plan of sleeping by
day, and writing throughout the night hours,
and of thus living for considerable periods
without seeing anyone save the domestic who
fetched the sustaining coffee : and Balzac's mas-
terworks remain to prove this an excellent way
of writing really profound studies of contem-
porary life. It secures, to begin with, an ab-
normal viewpoint, concerning the need of which
I have spoken at sujBScient length. And besides,
it is undeniable that a person who steadily per-
sisted in this ordering of his existence, as Bal-

259

BEYOND LIFE

zao did through some twenty-odd years, will not
be creatively wind-bound by his knowledge of
actoalities and human natnre as displayed
therein: nor need I point out that the later vol-
umes of the Comedie Humame are oonoededly
the best, improving as they did in ratio to Bal-
zac's increasing forgetfolness of the trath
about his subject . . . Given the requisite ge-
nius, anyone of us may do well to follow his ex-
ample. But the programme is arduous, and,
first of all, you must be quite sure about the
genius.

To divigate once more into egotism, I recall
a book that was published some years ago with,
I believe, quite gratifying misprision of the of-
fence. This volume, at any rate, was handi-
capped by a preface in which this identical tru-
ism was cited, — ^that what mankind has gener-
ally agreed to accept as first-dass art, in any of
the varied forms of fictitious narrative, has
never been a truthful reproduction of the art-
ist's era. And the author, as I recall it, went
on at some length to consider the futility of our
''vital'' novels, which affect to dispose of this or
that problem of the day in the terms of ''faith^

260

THE CONTEMPOBAB¥

fol realisuL'' I was rather taken with the
writer's exposition of what were more or less
my own theories: and so, was no little inter-
ested, later, by the verdict thereanent of one of
the few living novelists who, as a matter of any
intelligent belief, has done work which will en-
dnre. ... I think that verdict will repay
quoting:

''Mr. is exactly right in intimating that

the 'timely' is not generaUy the 'timeless.' And
yet I can't help saying (I snppose, becanse 'no
rogue e'er felt the halter draw with good opin-
ion of the law') that I think it is a possible thing
to be timely, if (and tliis is a very large 'if') the
'timely' is merely a method of showing the
timeless. That is to say, if the reaction of the
momentary phase of existence expresses some
eternal phase of the human sonL Unde Tom^a
Cabin was timely enough, but it was not its
timeliness that made it survive : it was because,
it seems to me, the book dealt with the ultimate
passions of the human creature, with fear, and
pity, and love. One could, I think, write a novel
upon, say, the latest thing in automobiles, if the
eccentricities of the self-starter or what-not sim-
ply ministered to some expression of that per-
manently 'vital' thing, the human heart • . .

261

BEYOND LIFE

'^I have twice ventured to be timely in fiction,
and therefore I know how true is everything
this Induction says about the ^' vital" noveL
And yet, ^Strike, but hear me I' Isn't it the
trouble with Undine Spragg, for instance, that
the ^vitahiess* of the book is not founded upon
truth, and therefore cannot possibly be perma-
nent? It looks to me as if these people who
tried to be ^ vital' dealt only with facts : and the
trouble with facts seems to be, that if one treats
them out of relation to the rest of life, they be-
come lies. Mrs. Wharton, for whose art I have
the prof oundest respect and admiration, offers
us those horrid people in The Custom of the
Cotmtry, with souls of a uniform tint of rather
nasty and very dull blackness. Now, that is not
true to life. There are black souls, God knows I
But even in the blackest of them, I am con-
vinced that the true artist will see some glim-
mering of white. To treat only the black, is in-
deed to be ^timely': it is to represent the mo-
ment and the phase, and not the everlasting
emotions. . • .

''This Induction cuffs my ears so soundly, and
so deservedly (apropos of my last book) that I
have to ask for mercy, for myself and even for
(whose books I have never read). Yet so

262

THE CONTEMPOBABY

far as I am concerned, I did try to relate my
very timely subject to the timelessneBS of hu-
man passion, which seems to me like a living
root in the ground: the phases grow and blos-
som, like leaves and flowers, and drop into the
dust of tune, but the root remains/'

Now that is a summing-up which everyone, re-
membering the writer's books, must perforce
view with reverence. It is the verdict of a per-
son who speaks with authority. So I shall not
carp over an expression here and there, though
in regard to the permanent value of Uncle
Tom^s Cabin the temptation is considerable to
speak daggers. . . . Instead, I thankfully ac-
cept the formula whereby the novel (and equally
the play or poem) of contemporary life may,
]ust possibly, become fine literature: if that
which is timely therein be made merely a
method of showing that which is timeless, and
if the momentary phase of existence be utilized
to express some eternal phase of the human
soul. Concerning the size of those '^ifs'^ the
writer and I are in gratifying accord.

It comes ahnost to saying that the novel of
contemporary life, via the typewriter of the

263

BEYOND LIFE

serious artist, will return to the oldest of forms,
and become more or less an allegory. . . . In-
deed, this is inevitable. Book after book I find
in the department-stores narrating how this or
that particular person lived, wooed, married,
labored, reared children, got into the divorce
courts, made a fortune, acquired new opinions,
or died. Often it is so convincingly set forth
that the illusion of reality is produced: and for
the instant the reader does believe that all this
actually happened. But do you not see that to
produce this illusion amounts to nothing SBsthe-
tically t I read of marriages and divorces and
family squabbles and deaths and business-ven-
tures by the dozen in the morning paper : and I
believe that these too actually happened. Well,
the '^realistic'' school of fiction, at its most am-
bitious reach of tedium, aims to convey the same
impression, and nothing more. If ^ ' realism ' ' be
a form of art, the morning newspaper is a per-
manent contribution to literature. Undeniably,
the ''realist" invents his facts a trifle more dar-
ingly than the police reporter, and soars above
mere veracity on an approximate level with the
editorial writer: but not even on the plea of
imagination can he claim to rank with the com-
pilers of the weather predictions or of the so-

264

THE CONTEMPOBABY

dety colmnns. • . . What John Jones may do
or may refrain from doing really does not mat-
ter a button to anyone outside of his immediate
oirde of acquaintances: and the most faithful
record of his actions, surely, cannot be made of
enduring value to the world at large by the fact
that they never took place and that Jones never
existed. . • And yet, none the less, this novel
of contemporary life may be informed by art if,
through some occult magic, the tale becomes a
symbol: and if, however dimly, we comprehend
that we are not reading merely about ''John
Jones, aged 26, who gave his address as 187
West Avenue,'' but about humanity, — ^and about
the strivings of that ape reft of his tail, and
grown rusty at climbing, who yet, however
dimly, feels himself to be a symbol, and the frail
representative of Omnipotence in a place that is
not home; and so strives blunderingly, from
mystery to mystery, with pathetic makeshifts,
not understanding anything, greedy in all de-
sires, and honeycombed with poltroonery, and
yet ready to give all, and to die fighting, for the
sake of that undemonstrable idea. If, in short,
the chronicle becomes a symbol of that which is
really integral to human existence, in a sense to
which motor cars and marriage licenses and

265

BEYOND LIFE

even joys and miseries appear as extraneous
things, — ^why, then and then only, this tale of
onr contemporaries shifts incommnnicably to
fine art. • • •

I wonder if you are familiar with that un-
canny genius whom the London directory pro-
saically lists as Arthur Machent If so, you
may remember that in his maddening volume
Hieroglyphics Mr. Machen eircumvolantly ap-
proaches to the doctrine I have just voiced —
that all enduring art must be an allegory. No
doubt, he does not word this axiom quite ex-
plicitly: but then Mr. Machen very rarely ex-
presses outright that which his wizardry sug-
gests. And it is perhaps on account of this rash
reliance upon intelligence and imagination, as
being at all ordinary human traits, that Mr.
Machen has failed to appeal as instantly as, we
will say, Mr. Bobert W. Chambers* appeals to

*A novelist of the day, appropriately eomiiiflmorated hj Oap^
tain Bupert Hughes (another writer of fiction) in the Comro-
poliian Maganne, for Jone^ 1918. "Mr. Chambers • . . does
not ran abont the world shaking his fist at the sky or spitting
in other people's faces. • . • There is an eternal summer in his
heart The world is his rose garden.** Mr. Chambers^ aeeording
to the same anthorily, has written ^teasterpieoesi** 'Hrinmphs of
art,*? "snperb fantasy,** ^thrilling drama»** etc., etc., dealing for
the most part with "weQ-groomed men and women in tiieir
stately homes.*'

266

THE CONTEMPOBABY

those immaculate and terrible ladies who Ian-
gaidly vend books in our department stores,
and with Olympian unconcern confer success
upon reading-matter by "recommending" it.
. • But here in a secluded library is no place
to speak of the thirty years' neglect that has
been accorded Mr. Arthur Machen: it is the
sort of crime that ought to be discussed in the
Biblical manner, from the house-top. • . And,
besides, I am digressing.

Art, then, must deal with contemporary life
by means of symbols. Never for a moment will
art in dealing with the actual life about us re-
strict its concern to John Jones, as a person,
any more than, as I have suggested, does the
art of the Bible ever pivot upon Abraham or
Solomon as individual persons. . . It was
perhaps intuitively that Dickens — ^very briefly
to revert to him,— obeyed this necessity, but he
regarded it, none the less : and so you will find,
even to-day, the more hopelessly obtuse among
us deprecating that his characters are "per-
sonifications of certain qualities '\ . . And of
course it is idle to argue with folk who were men-
tally stillborn and grotesquely flourish the
corpse as something of which to be proud.
They boggle less over Thackeray, who explains

267

BEYOND LIFE

the meaning of his symbols over and over again,
with delightfully indefensible side-taking and
moralizing^ until even dullards comprehend
what he is writing about . .

Art, I repeat, must deal with contemporary
life by means of symbols. And the creative
writer should handle facts religiously, in that
particular mood of piety which holds that in-
complete accord with a creator's will is irre-
ligious. . . Facts must be kept in their proper
place, outside of which they lose veracity*

To go back a little— ^' the trouble with facts
seems to be, that if one treats them out of re-
lation to the rest of life, they become lies.''
• . There in brief you have the damnatory
frailty of ** realistic" novels, which endeavor
to show our actual existence from a viewpoint
wheref rom no human being ever saw it. For
literature— need I repeat it f— should be true to
life: and the serious artist will not attempt to
present the facts about his contemporaries as
these facts really are, since that is precisely the
one indiscretion which life never perpetrates.
In literature facts should not be handled intel-
ligently, for the simple reason that in living no

268

THE CONTEMPOBAEY

fact or happening reveals itself directly to
man's intelligence; but is apprehended as an
emotion, which the snstainer's prejudices color
with some freedom. Thus, were yon to hear of
yonr wife's sudden death it would come to you
not, I hope, as an interesting fact, but as a
grief: and with the advent of your first-bom
you are conscious not at all of tiie newcomer's
ugliness and untoothed imbecility— which are
the undeniable facts, — ^but gratefully receive a
priceless joy. All the important happenings of
life, indeed, present themselves as emotions
that are prodigally conformed by what our de-
sires are willing to admit : it is indisputable, for
instance, that a quite different account from
any which we now possess of the Betrayal and
Crucifixion would have been rendered, and hon-
estly believed in, by the mother of Judas. Even
life's trivialities arrive in the livery of emotion;
to receive a letter is either a pleasure or a
nuisance, and what there is for dinner appre-
ciably affects the spirit-leveL We, in fine, thus
fritter through existence without ever encoun-
tering any facts as they actually are : for in life
no fact is received as truth until the percipient
has conformed and colored it to suit his prefer-

269

BEYOND LIFE

ences : and in this also literatore should be trae
to life. . .

Then, too, to make a complete and fair-
minded analysis of any human being, as "real-
ists*' affect to do, is forthwith to avoid any con-
ceivable viewpoint : since our acquaintances, to
whom alone we are impartial, we do not take the
trouble to analyze, and to our intimates, with
whom alone we are familiar, we can by no possi-
bility remain impartial. You would thus no
more think of inquiring into your grocer's rea-
sons for turning Methodist than of abhorring
your brother because he happened to have mur-
dered somebody. . . The artist, as has been
said, requires a viewpoint that is abnormal : but
he can make no very profitable use of one which
does not exist. That much cried-up volume,
Madame Bovary, for example, is doubtless a
painstaking delineation of a sort of a some-
thing, which nobody can take oath to be a wo-
man. For, inasmuch as this deplorable Emma
is studied with an intimacy and an aloofness of
feeling which in human life cannot coexist in an
observer, you have no data whereby "to judge
the portrait's verisimilitude. It may resemble
a certain woman seen from that especial stand-
point: but then nobody ever saw a real woman

270

THE CONTEMPOBABY

from that standpoint The thing may well be
like a village doctor's wife when thus regarded :
yet so far as positive knowledge goes, it may be
even more like a dromedary viewed from the
North Pole: for Flaubert is refining phrases
about a collocation outside of human experi-
ence. . • Andall the other ''realistic'' writers,
who thus set forth to record intelligently the
facts of cotemporaneous existence, are intro-
ducing facts to the reader's perception after a
fashion for which life affords no paraUeL And
so their facts becomes lies, because ''realism"
as a literary method is fundamentally untrue
to life; and by attempting to exhibit our con-
temporaries as being precisely what they are,
does but very ill compare with actual life, which
is far more charitable.

Beally there should be no trifling with facts.
For always the ever-present danger exists that,
in treating of the life immediately about him,
even the unobservant literary genius may notice
that this life for the most part consists of ugly
and stupid persons doing foolish things, and
will take a despondent view of the probable out-
come, • , Not everyone of us, whatever our

271

BEYOND LIFE

private belief , writes quite as nnderstandingly
as Shakespeare : and even he, in addition to the
peccadilloes previously noted, was very guilty
of Timon and of TroUus and Cressida. But
Shakespeare, being what he was, went beyond
all that, and came at last to the astounding
** romantic" plays written after his retirement
to Stratford. . . There is strong meat in their
serene indifference to mbral indignation. Le-
ontes and lachimo and Antonio of Milan are
every whit as evil as Shylock and lago : but the
dramatist is not at pains to invent any punish-
ment for the latelier-begotten scoundrels ; for to
enwidened vision it has become doubtful if the
full reach of human wickedness can, after all,
amount to very much. . •

And so this poet is reputed to have said : ^^I
never knew a wicked person. I question if any-
body ever did. Undoubtedly, short-sighted
people exist who have floundered rato ill-doing:
but it proves always to have been on account
of either cowardice or folly, and never because
of malevolence; and in consequence, their sorry
pickle should demand commiseration far more
loudly than our blame. In short, I find hu-
manity to be both a weaker and a better-mean-
ing race than I had suspected. . , I ^(mt the

272

THE CONTEMPOBABY

world to be composed of muck and sunshine in-
termingled: but, upon the whole, I find the sun-
shine more pleasant to look at. . • And I hold
that all human imbroglios, in some irrational
and quite incomprehensible fashion, will be
straightened to our satisfaction. . • Mean-
while this universe of ours, and, reverently
speaking, the Maker of this universe as well, is
under no actual bond to be intelligible in deal-
ing with us."

That, too, is the verdict of a person who
knows what he is talking about It is the ano-
dyne, however variously labeled, of every can-
did philosopher in putting up with those innu-
merable, continuous, small, nagging and ines-
capable annoyances which compound his life as
a human being : and it serves as a cordial to sus-
tain him in almost all his dealings with his con-
temporaries. Equally it is a creed to which the
literary artist, also, must cling fast, yet not too
desperately, in dealing with his contempo-
raries. . • It is the utterance of a man who,
to revert to the old phrase, **has encountered
Pan,'* and yet has perceived, too, that in every-
thing romance, to serve the unforeseeable pur-
pose of the demiurge, begets and nourishes the
dynamic illusion of optimism. And he knows,

273

BEYOND LIFE

he knows not how, that the demiurgio spirit of
romance strives not without discernment
toward noble ends. Thus it is alone that, in
defiance of the perturbing spectacle of man'e
futility and insignificance, as the passing skin-
trouble of an unimportant planet, he can still
foster hope and urbanity and all the other gal-
lant virtues, serenely knowing all the while that
if he builds without any firm foundation his feat
is but the more creditable.

274

THE ARBITERS

275

She stood bof «ro Idm in all tko baoatlfiil ftrongtb of
iMryoang womanhood.

Ho WM really a flue looking yoimg man with the ap-.
poannoo of being exoeptionaDjr well-bred and well-kept»f
Indeed the moat eaaoal of obeerYwa would not hame heel-'
tated to prononnee him a thoroughbred and a good indi-
Tidoal of the beet type that the raee has prodneed. • • •

— Barbara^ ho eried^ dont yon hnow that I love yent
. • • Don't you know that nothing else matterst Your
desert has tani^t mo many things, dear, bat nothing so
great as this— tiiat I want yon and that nothing elsa
I want you for my wife.

— Thtf Wkmlmg of Batrham Wtnih

276

fThich Defers to the

Arbiters

To attain the ends I have indicated may,
then, be taken as the peculiar duty of the
literary artist who is reduced to writing
about his contemporaries. . . Put to a jury
of average discrimination, however, the ques-
tion, what is the first requirement of a novelist t
would probably result in a hung verdict. The
less prosaic would answer ^^A publisher," and
the ten dullards would prattle of ^'original
ideas" quite as though they discoursed of pos-
sibilities. And the whole dozen would be right
enough: for the publisher is really indispens-
able, whereas from the point of view of com-
merce — and really sBsthetics is in no wise con-
cerned,-— our modem novel is nothing if it have
not some superficial novelty, to arrest the rov-
ing and languid interest with whidi all people
(turned pessimists by experience) hear about
new fiction. . • Yet the humane laws of the

277

BEYOND LIFE

land compel no man to read another's book.
Ehnboldened by this fact, the general reader de-
mands, with Ids visage too betraying such les-
thetic zeal as may fairly be described as char-
acteristic: —

'^ Interest me, against my natural inclina-
tions, in your printed nonsense, and I will buy
such novels of yours as I cannot borrow. I do
not at all go in for reading and that sort of
thing, when I can find anything else to do:
but once in a while there is a vacant half-hour
I have to get rid of somehow. At such times I
am willing to put you on an equal footing with
the evening paper and the cinematograph, since
I reserve the right to quit any one of you the
moment I find the entertainment distasteful
So, go ahead now with your fooleries and re-
member I am here to be shocked or elevated or
instructed or harrowed or otherwisetakenout of
myself: and let us have no 'literary' nonsense,
because I resent the impudence of people who
allude to matters that I do not understand."

It seems little enough to ask in return for a
whole ten per cent commission on a book that
costs the general reader, very often, as much
as his cravat. Still, it is a mercantile offer,
which every true artist would meet with con-

278

THE AEBITEBS

tempt if only it were possible to discharge
the monthly accounts with the same coinage.
But, unfortunately, most books are less a ques-
tion of art than of bread and butter. The aver-
age fiction-writer, at all events, can afford to
look down upon the public only, as the acrobat
looks down upon the tight-rope, to ascertain
whither it leads, and to make sure that it will
support him. . •

Nor is it impeccable etiquette to blow one's
own trumpet: yet each musician undoubtedly
makes the most noise with his own instrument.
So in the Vanity Pair of Current Letters every
tradesman makes bold to commend his especial
wares. . . The attractions are many and vari-
ous. Here is Mr. Booth Tarkington dispensing,
past doubt, the best confectionery in the mar-
ket At the familiar stand Mr. W. D. Howells
is still making tintypes, and guaranteeing a per-
fect likeness. Mr. Bernard Shaw, of course, is
in charge of that intriguing exhibition, the
Crazy House, where everything is exhibited up-
side down: and in the fortune-teller's tent, re-
cently vacated by Mr. H. G. Wells, is prophesy-
ing this week I forget precisely who. Yonder
row of pavilions is devoted to a display of pre-
cocious orphans, and you are warned not to

279

^ I

BEYOND LIFE

enter with less than two pocket handkerchiefs.
Those who are interested by the sport of shy-
ing missiles at inkily colored persons can be
diverted, to your left, at any number of stalls,
conducted by such dissimilar folk as ambassa-
dors, newspaper correspondents, retired
spies, and ex-governesses to the nobility.
Over yonder a very considerable section of the
fair-grounds is set apart for the performances
commended by Colonel Boosevelt And of
course there are any number of tents with
flamboyant placards stating that the exhibit
within concerns the highest and most exclusive
society, and narrowly escaped being forbidden
by the police. . . It is a motley bazaar, and to
make any choice therein cannot but puzzle the
visitor with limited resources for his fairing.
Now all this is very new and original indeed,
and the general reader ought to be satisfied.
For it is at his demand the age thus pullulates
with reading-matter for the non-literary. Still,
all progress brings its attendant problems: and
in this case one honestly wonders what is to be-
come of our old literary masterpieces, now that
people decline to read them. For there can be
no earthly doubt that to a steadily augmenting
majority the time-honored bulk of English lit-

280

THE ABBITEBS

eratnre means only a forgotten ^'oonrse'' at
school or college, along with the calonlns and
botany and other matters there is no longer
any need to worry over, until it comes to help-
ing the children with their lessons. . •

Nor was this state of affairs avoidable. In
order to appreciate the productions of a de-
parted age, it is necessary to be familiar with
the era: and time has added ruthlessly, no less
to the ranks of literary masterpieces, than to
the number of requisite viewpoints. There is
really no end of actual drudgery entailed nowa^
days in becoming tolerably conversant with
English literature, and comprehending, if but
more or less, what the authors are about. And
when it comes to consideration of their interplay
on one another, and their derivative sources,
and their borrowings from other literatures —
all which are quite essential studies if we are
to read with comprehension, — ^the prospect
broadens out into little better than a lifetime of
penal servitude. It is a vista before which the
student quails, and the better-balanced general
public shrugs and turns its back.

As a case in point, one may well consider that
especial glory of English letters, the much-
vaunted plays of the Elizabethan and Jacobean

281

BEYOND LIFE

dramatists, which justly rank so high in litera-
ture that few can endure the altitude. Here
for the asking is, in cold earnest, **the greatest
part of the greatest period of the greatest lit-
erature of the world^*: and to extol this quite
priceless literary heritage of ours as animated,
impassioned, brilliant and inimitable, would be
to deal in text-book truisms ; but to describe it
as generally pleasant reading would be an
absurdity. To the most of us such portions as
we can understand at all sound unconmionly
like nonsense: and throughout, the flavor of
unreality in these dramas is even stronger than
their depressing odor of antiquity. Our in-
stinctive attitude toward them becomes much
the same as that of Tom Tulliver toward the
Latin language. Tet managers once with per-
fect justice classed these plays as ^^ light popu-
lar stuff," and the jokes we puzzle out with the
aid of commentaries and foot-notes were put
in for the especial benefit of the uneducated.
. . Then there is The Spectator, which time
has transmuted from a popular periodical into
a pest. And all the productions of Mrs. Aphra
Behn, the seventeenth century Elinor Glyn,
and of Samuel Richardson, who was the Flor-
ence Barclay of his day, — ^these too assist to

282

THE ARBITERS

prompt avoidance of the well selected li-
brary.* . .

For time has erected barriers more or less
serious before all the '^popular" reading-
matter of yester-year. From this side of the
fence, the prospect seems attractive enough,
and for Cervantes, let us say, nearly everybody
has a civil superlative. • . But the actual climb-
ing of the palings, to the extent of reading
famous books, instead of the books about them,
provokes inevitable disillusioxL The moon is
beyond question interesting when glanced at
through a moderate sized telescope, but actu-
ally to sojourn on its surface might prove in-
sufferably tedious. . • Thus every self-respect-
ing person will assure you, with whatever pro-
nunciatory divergence, that Don Quixote is one
of the great characters of fiction: and past
doubt the ingenious gentleman of La Mancha
is a delightful companion, in antidpatioxt
What could be more diverting than the adven-

*GharteriB likens Biehardson and Mrs. Behn to writers eon-
temporarj with Gharteris. "Mrs. Glyn possesses a briUiant in-
teUeet^ which she uses to probe unsparinglj into the hninaa
sonL" • • CotmapcUian Magagine for September 1918. Mrs. Bar-
daj also has admirers.

283

BEYOND LIFE

tare of Mambrino's helmet, and that perfectly
killing affair of the windmills t and where will
you find nowadays sudi wonderful character-
drawing as in Sancho Panzat Ton thrill to the
notion of a jaunt through old-world Spain in
company with these two immortal types of hu-
manity, concerning whom, as you glowingly
remember, it has been strikingly observed by
Somebody-or-other that such-and-such is the
case. • . So you begin the book, in an atmos-
phere of genial goodf ellowship, which vanishes
long before the end of the fourth chapter. For
it is an unfortunate fact that, so far as most of
us are concerned, the essayists have written
much more entertainingly about Don Quixote
than Cervantes ever did. And when you fair-
mindedly consider that noble structure which
commentators and occasional writers have
erected with the works of Babelais as founda-
tion, you will hardly contend that the most at-
tractive portion of the building is the cellar. • .
Tet, by the pertinacious, these time-raised
barriers are surmountable: and once over,
there is pleasant enough adventuring to be
found, in and about the domains that are being
held in trust for posterity. The surroundings
are, indeed, rather different from what might

284

THE ARBITERS

be expected. Some monmnents of geniuSi which
from a distance seemed most imposing, reveal
to closer inspection a great deal of dmnsy
joiner 's-work: and others torn out to be mere
piles of odds and ends. Posterity appears to
be as much by way of falling heir to the slap-
dash and the incidental work as to inheriting
that which was aspiringly put together for her
edification. • . Indeed, a many ambitions
epistles especially designed for posterity's
perusal have gone astray in transit, and any
number of personal communications, addressed
elsewhere and written with never a thought of
her, have fallen by pure luck into the hands of
her trustees, to be ranked among her most
amiable treasures. . .

There was one John Dryden, for example,
who was incessantly plaguing himself about the
debatable tastes of unborn readers : tragedies,
comedies, satires, pastorals, elegies, and other
dignified displayals of his genius were de-
spatched to posterity every year. There lived
coetaneously, in the same city, a government
official of more or less importance, a secretary
of the Admiralty, who in hours of leisure jotted
down a diary for his own amusement. Dryden
was a fine poet, and wears morocco worthily:

285

BEYOND LIFE

there is perhaps no surer test of culture than
an ability to read The Conquest of Oranada
with enjoyment. Still, nobody pretends it is
as pleasant to yawn over The Spanish Friar
and Sir Martin Mar-all as to listen to Mr.
Pepys's quarrels with his wife ("poor
wretch I"), observe the glowworms with Mrs.
Turner, and witness the execution of Major
Harrison, — ^who, having been hanged, drawn
and quartered, with really deathless optimism,
"looked as cheerful as any man could do in
that condition." Shall we glance over The
Hind and the Panther and Absalom and Achi-
tophel, those eminently meritorious produc-
tions, or shall we follow the secretary from the
House to Hercules-pillars t— -or to a stolen tete-
fi-tete with Mrs. Knipp, or to church, or to the
Duke's theater, or to an hour's practise on
the flute, or to reflective contemplation of
Saturn through a twelve foot glass, and "so to
bed"! There is only one answer for any right-
minded man. • . The reading public, of course,
is not right-minded. This is not to say, indeed,
that the general public prefers Dryden to
Pepys: to the contrary, it enrolls both, with
most of our elder writers, in the ranks of the
Great Unread. . •

286

THE ARBITERS

As we have seen, then, among the important
questions of our time (as public speaker pleas-
ingly put it) is the problem: what can be done
toward educating the taste of the general read-
ing public And the answer, of course, is
bother the general public! It reads what it
chooses, has always done so, and will in all
probability continue to do so indefinitely. The
general public to-day, as always, has no con-
cern with literature, which, as previously
pointeQ out, is a starveling cult kept alive by
the ** literary '\ And vice versa, we have seen
too that when literature at all considers the
taste of the general public and the trend of the
writer's time, the result may range anywhere
between the ** comedy '^ of Marlowe and the
** sentiment of Sheridan, over an awe-inspir-
ing field of enormities. . . Meanwhile the gen-
eral public patronizes Mr. Winston Churchill,*
and Mrs. Florence Barclay, and Mr. Sydnor
Harrison, and Mr. Harold Bell Wright, through
just that sober enjoyment of being told over and
over again what nobody thinks of denying which

*0harteri8 here enumerates a few writers— all novelists, —
who were in vogue at the time he spoke.

287

BEYOND LIFE

weekly draws it chnrchward. It regales itself
with Sir Conan Doyle, and Mr. E, W. Cham-
bers, and Mr. Phillips Oppenheim, and Sir Hall
Caine, on much the principle that it eats pop-
corn and peanuts, less from any especial de-
light in the diet than from an impulse to get to
the bottom of the bag. And lastly, and above
all, the general public quite sincerely enjoys
reading any book, of any kind, that is being
read by the public generally, through much that
herd instinct for doing what everybody else is
doing, which exalts sane women upon three-
inch heels, and attaches buttons to the sleeves
and coat-tails of presumably intelligent men.
So that in reading the general public is not in-
fluenced by its literary taste, but by qualities
less esoteric.

This, then, is the conclusion of the matter:
that, as literature goes, the verdict, or rather
the aversion, of the reading public may be dis-
regarded. For literature is a cult kept alive by
the '^literary.'' And the fact that the general
public no longer reads time-hallowed books has
really no more to do with literature than hava
the books it actually does read. Sometimes, for
one reason or anotiier, the general public talks
about, and perhaps reads, a quite excellent

288

THE AEBITEES

piece of writing. And were there a company
that insured the lives of books — ^though prob-
ably no author, even as beneficiary, would ever
admit that any seeming demise among his
brain-children amounted to more than cata-
lepsy,— it is gratifying to-day to note the num-
ber of apparently good ** risks** in America.
For instance, this desiderated company would
beyond doubt insure at a quite moderate pre-
mium the ink and paper offspring of Mr. Joseph
Hergesheimer: and would not the terms offered
Mr. Booth Tarkington (to whom I shall pres-
ently recur in exasperated admiration) be made
unusually ** attractive**!

One is here tempted to enumerate at least a
corporal's guard of promising living candidates
for the 'Miterary themes** of unbuilded class-
rooms; and is deterred by the reflection that aU
such lists can only be dictated by prejudice
and compiled by self conceit. Setting aside his
own books, no living author could very confi-
dently go on record as to what Arks are just
now discernible in the deluge of current fic-
tion, because in such matters any honest proph-
ecy is a vain thing. Posterity amasses its lit-
erary heirlooms by no known standard: and
when it comes to predicting which books will

289

BEYOND LIFE

live, and which are passing into oblivion via
tremendous popularity, no person, and no class
of persons, is competent to say what trait it is
that, somehow, gives a book vitality.

Publishers, upon fheir purely commercial
plane, appear agreed that the miracle is per-
formed, very much as vitality was conferred
on Adam, by word of mouth. When readers
commend a novel to their acquaintances, so
rumor runs in editorial fastnesses, the book's
future is assured **Now, that's what I call a
pretty good story,'* says So-and-so: and Such-
an-one receives the dictum with a confidence he
would never accord the verdict of a professional
reviewer, whose approval is vexatiously apt
sometimes to be based upon the volume's merits
as a piece of literature. . .

Now the age-old sneer against professional
reviewers as being unsuccessful authors, who
have acquired, by virtue of demonstrating their
innate incapacity to write readable books, a
glib ability to instruct others in that art, is in
most cases pointless. Usually, indeed, it is the
other way around: and one might enumerate
any number of present-day novelists whom the

290

THE ARBITERS

decade has seen like stars start from their criti-
cal spheres. Even were the old slur always barb-
ed with veracity, however, its repetition need
gall nobody. For the practising reviewer of cur-
rent reading-matter has, of course, in the exer-
cise of his trade no more concern with literary
values than has the shoemaker or the magazine-
editor or the blacksmith in the pursuit of their
several vocations. This rule, like every gen-
eral rule, is attested by its exception, to-day
delightfully incarnate in the always exceptional
Mr. H. L. Mencken,— who illicitly begets new
ideas upon ancient culture, and, like an erratic
chemist, uses as an acid to test contemporary
humbug such erudition as staider critics employ
as oxygen for the moribund in tooled calf. No
less, this rule applies to normal persons : and a
conscientious newspaper critic ought not to read
mucLof anything. The books he is condemned
to review are naturally out of the question, were
it but that his contribution toward his family's
support depends upon retention of his mental
health : whereas familiarity with what mankind
has in the main agreed to accept as great lit-
erature will handicap him without fail, and ulti-
mately will lessen the market-value of his para-
graphs, by mitigating the infallibility of his tone.

291

BEYOND LIFE

For, no one who cared cordially for literature
has ever been a competent critic of literature.
To the mental eye examples throng with the re-
puted contigoity of leaves in Vallambrosa. The
men and women who made our enduring books
have by ordinary been mistaken in appraising
the relative importance of what they themselves
had written, and almost every one of them has
tended to estimate as a feather in his cap what
posterity has found a thorn in the side. But in
weighing the value of one another's produc-
tions, distinguished authors have been wrong
without f aiL You must permit me a few pe-
dantic citations of appalling instances. . .
Voltaire considered Shakespeare a barbarian,
and said so without scruple or any great harm.
Madame de Stael complained of the '^ common-
ness" of Jane Austen's novels, of which the
merits were equally imperceptible to Charlotte
Bronte. Wordsworth termed Candide ''the
dull product of a scoffer's pen," to the aston-
ishment of many who would otherwise have con-
sidered the author of Peter Bell an authority on
dullness. Coleridge discovered nothing very
remarkable in Gray. Southey complained that
the Essays of Elia were lacking in sound re-
ligious feeling, and pronounced The AnohiU

292

THE ARBITERS

Mariner ''the dumsiest attempt at German
sublimity I ever saw/' Keats (at whom Byron
sneered) fonnd in the writers of the Angastan
age of England only a school of dolts that mis-
took a rocking-horse for Pegasus : and his espe-
cial indignation against their precentor, Boil-
eau, is not imnaturali in view of the latter's
plagiarism of his *^rien n'est heau que le vrai'^
from Keats 's most often quoted line, — ^made
with low cunning so many years before the birth
of Keats. . . Then Thackeray has left it on
record that either he or Dickens understood
nothing about novel-writing: and Dickens
agreed with him, as posterity on this particular
point has done with neither. For the rest,
Swinburne was at small pains to conceal his
real opinion of Tennyson, and Dr. Johnson con-
sidered whipping the proper reward of any-
one who would read twice a poem of Milton's. . .
One might cite other instances, but the mad tale
would stretch to the crack of doom. Its un-
avoidable moral would seem to be that this
word-of -mouth criticism by concededly incompe*
tent people, through which books '^sell," is in
comparison quite competent criticism.

5
Thus to repeat, at this late day, the sayings

298

BEYOND LIFE

of obsolete persons who wrote novels in monthly
numbers and poems in metrical verse, may no
donbt appear pedantic: but even so, these dire
examples prove pretty plainly that you cannot
trust a man who has read much, to select your
reading-matter. Literature is precisely the one
thing which cannot be correctly judged from
literary standpoints. We come thus to the gist
of the whole matter, — ^that by each of us what-
ever he reads or finds unreadable must be ap-
praised independently. One may merely say —
with reverent acknowledgment that the verdict
has no jurisdiction in remoter libraries, —
whether or not one likes the book. After all,
that is the only thing about the volume which
matters. If a book gives pleasure, then, in so
far as the reader is concerned, it is a praise-
worthy book. Wiser men may go farther, and
fare proverbially, by explaining how and why it
pleases: as in like manner, a stationer might
fix the precise value of its paper per ream. But
none of these may settle the sole question in
which any reader can take rational interest,—
which is, whether or not he likes the book.
Everybody must decide that matter for him-
self: and no critic can help in the decision, from
Mr. Chesterton of The Illustrated London

THE AEBITEBS

News to Job of Uz, who first of all people be*
trayed the characteristics of a bom reviewer,
by his disparaging reaumS of the Tmiverse and
his unconcealed desire to have his enemy write
a book.

By each of ns whatever he reads must be ap-
praised independently. The general reading
public, without knowing it, has grasped, and
practises, this great fundamental principle of
criticism; which yet remains unapprehended by
far more cultured persons, to their not incon-
siderable annoyance. Thus, more extensive
recognition of this principle would do away
with at least one gigantic humbug that continu-
ally teases most Americans, — say, all those per-
sons of sufficient social rank to take interest
in the current price of gasoline, — ^who go en-
shackled by the necessity of having, or pretend-
ing to have, some knowledge of, and even a
liking for, the books generally accepted to con-
stitute the main glories of literature. It would
put a stop to much pernicious platitudinizing
as to the Hundred Best Books and Five-Foot
Shelves to contain them, by pedagogues whose
first requirement is that an author be no longer

295

BEYOND LIFE

alive, and by aesthetes who merely demand that
he abstain from liveliness. For no book conld
then in itself be *'best'* or even **good'': its
merits wonld confessedly depend on who was
reading it Viewed from an ethical standpoint
alone, the incurrent benefits of this understand-
ing wonld be invaluable. We wonld be relieved
from the compulsion of seeming to admire The
Faery Queen; we need not, even in writing
essays, refer knowingly to Richardson with an
air of having read his novels; and if we found
Miss Corelli* a more congenial companion than
Shakespeare, — nor can there be any possible
doubt as to with which of these twain the ma-
jority of us have most in common, — ^we could
unhesitatingly say so. The morality of book-
purchasers would be raised, and reading wonld
become to people of education a positive pleas-
ure. Nowadays it is not entirely all cakes and
ale : for if one reads with any higher quest than
pastime, misguided self-respect will presently
be snaring the unwary into great company. The
genius of ^schylos and Virgil and Dante, and

*A noyeliBt of the day. 'Ififls OoreDi'B storiee ... are
mudk more than novels that are read and are forgotten; tiietf
contain sound philosophy; they stimnlaie the mind; they edu-
cate; th^ are pennaDeaf— sHear^ft Magagiine, September,
1917.

296

THE AEBITEES

such folk, is so stupendous that it can be ad-
mired from a oonsiderablel distance. Very few
of us are fit to associate with these superior
beings, or with the attempt, to be quite at ease
in Sion. We are, when all is said, perturbed be-
fore such high-strung utterance, and reflect that
sensible people take existence more easUy. Su-
blime, immortal, and after that out of all
whooping, we may willingly and honestly ac-
claim these bards, without of necessity enjoy-
ing their books. So we admire, more or less
whole-heartedly: and when it comes to reading,
pick up the handiest new popular novel, with
rather less optimism than when, with similar
intent, we enter into conversation with stran-
gers on a railway journey, in order to kill off
a vacant half -hour.

And it is highly improbable that you or I will
live to see a termination of this lying about
literature, — ^which is, to all appearance, as in-
stinctive as the dislike every healthy boy enter-
tains toward the Bible. It may happen, indeed,
that the day will never dawn wherein honest
persons may without incurring the suspicion of
illiteracy or posturing admit the longwinded
drivel of The Life and Strange Surprising Ad-
ventures of Rohinson Crusoe of York, Mariner,

297

. I

BEYOND LIFE

to be commensurate with the title; and point
out that the erotic misdemeanors of Tom Jones
are, after all, too few and too inadequately de-
tailed to prevent his biography being tiresome.
These books, with many others, retain a sort of
barnacle-grasp on literature, long after loss of
vitality. And they will never be out of print,
of course, in view of the delightful cycle of
romance which centres about each, in the form
of essays on its author's life and genius.

Yet always the consoling thought remains
that, while cowardice may force us to speak rev-
erently of famous books, no police-regulation
has ever dared to meddle with hypocrisy. And
the humane laws of the land compel no man to
read another's books. . .

Meanwhile illiteracy is becoming as rare as
all the other characteristics of the Golden Age.
. . And among the multifarious results of uni-
versal education, the candid philosopher will
not fail to admire a curious by-product of teach-
ing everybody to read (in disregard of most
persons' really cultivable powers), in the mod-
em American novel of commerce, thriving

298

THE AEBITEES

everywhere by virtue of the truism that unto
each his like seems good . .

That venerable adage may be taken as the not
very startling explanation of the appeal of
every really popular novel nowadays. It is
abont the sort of book its average reader wotild
have written were he, too, stung by the gadfly
of self-expression. It is a book which respects
its average reader's limitations, for the excel-
lent reason that the author shares them. It is
a book which flatters its readers' pet delusions,
because the author also honestly believes these
rank among the eternal verities. And above all,
of course, it is a book which pictures humanity
as a superhuman race, who are leading pur-
poseful lives, and have always in view some
clearly apprehended aim, whetiier it be a lady's
happiness or the will of somebody's unde. For
that each of us is consciously attempting to get
something perfectly definite out of existence, is
the average man's most jealously preserved
belief, if only because it is the most difficult to
preserve. So that the reward for manufactur-
ing reading-matter of this sort is very prop-
erly munificent, since the precise intellectual
defidendes necessary thereto must be conge-

299

BEYOND LIFE

nitaly and certainly cannot be acquired by tak-
ing thought.

Books fulfilling these general requirements
fall into innumerable sub-divisions, which might
be not unprofitably catalogued by students of
arrested development Meanwhile Mr. Win-
ston Churchill* has his clientdle, who stand
ready to purchase all further simply-worded ex-
planations of the obvious. Here and there
some of the very faithful admirers of Mr. Syd-
nor Harrison* are prepared to make affidavit
they read all of F V'a Eyes, as this writer rather
quaintly christened the best of his books. Mr.
E. W. Chambers,* too, retains his eminently
Cosmopolitan audience to the utmost reach of
the rural delivery routes: and thousands will
never think of refraining from the meed of a
melodious tear so long as Mrs. Florence Bar-
day* continues to publish woes untold. And
Mr. Booth Tarkington, also, is a very popular
novelist . . But that I take to be one of the
most tragic items in all the long list of misfor-
tunes which have befallen American literature.
It is a fact that merits its threnody, since the
loss of an artist demands lamentation, even
when he commits suicide.

^Compare page 287.

200

THE ARBITERS

For itf as Stevenson dedared, the fairies were
tipsy at Mr. Sapling's christening, at Mr. Tark-
ington's they must have been in the last stage
of mandlin generosity. Poetic insight they gave
him; and the knack of story building; and all
their own anthentic elfin liveliness of fancy;
and actually perceptive eyes, by virtue of which
his more truly Tarkingtonian pages are en-
riched with countless happy little miracles of
observation; and the dramatic gift, of contriv-
ing and causing to move convincingly a wide
variety of puppets in nothing resembling the
puppet-master; and the not uncommon desire
to "write/' with just enough deficiency in com-
mon-sense to make him willing to put up with
the laboriousness of writing fairly well. In fine,
there is hardly one natural endowment requisite
to grace in a creative author that was omitted
by these inebriated fairies. And to all this Mr.
Tarkington has since added, through lonesome
and grinding toil, an astounding proficiency at
the indoor sport of adroit verbal expression.
No living manipulator of English employs the
contents of his dictionary more artfully or, in

301

BEYOND LIFE

the general hackneyed and misleading phrasOt
has a better **8tyle.**

No less, for many years Mr. Tarkington has
been writing "best-sellers/' varied every once
in a while by something that was a ^'best-
seller'' in nature rather than performance. EBs
progress has been from the position of a for-
midable rival of the late Mr. Charles Major
(not very long ago the world-famous author of
a story entitled When Knighthood Was in
Flower) to the point of figuring proibinently in
The Saturday Evening Post.* So that, upon
the whole, one wonders if ere this the fairies
have not humored their prot^ yet further,
by becoming Prohibitionists.'

Mr. Tarkington has published nothing that
does not make very '^pleasant'' reading. He
has in fact re-written the quaint legend, that
virtue and honest worth must rise inevitably
to be the target both of rice-throwing and of
respectful consideration by the bank cashier, as

*A widely eireulated adyertising medium whieh printed oon-
sideimble Action; published in Philadelphia.

tSeetarianB of the period, who upheld the tenets of Moham-
med as opposed to those of Christ in the matter of beverages;
and made of dietary preferences a national issae^ in imitation of
the wars of LiUiput and Blef esea otst the preferable manner of
eating eggs. Oharteris frequentlj mentions this heresy.

202

THE ARBITERS

indef atigably as human optimism and the en-
durance of the human wrist would reasonably
permit. For the rest, his plots are the sort of
^faing that makes criticism seem cmeL His ven-
triloqnism is startling in its excellence ; but his
marionettes, under the most life-like of exteri-
orSy have either hearts of gold or entrails of
sawdust; there is no medium: and as touches
their behavior, all the Tarkingtonian puppets
"form themselves** after the example of the
not unfamous young person who had a curl in
the middle of her forehead. And Mr. Tarking-
ton's auctorial philosophy was summed up long
ago, The Oentleman from Indiana. "Look,"
said Helen. "Aren't they good dear peopled
— ^•'The beautiful people I'* he answered.

Now this, precisely this, Mr. Tarkington has
been answering ever since to every riddle in
life. To-day he is still murmuring, for publica-
tion, "The good dear people, the beautiful peo-
ple 1'*— who, according to his very latest bulle-
tin at the moment I speak, are presently to be
awarded suitable residences in "a noble and
joyous city, unbelievably white. * ' Questionless,
the apostrophe, no less than the prediction, is
"pleasant" to the apostrophized his chosen and
enormous au£ence ; and as such is well received

303

BEYOND LIFE

by the majority, who according to our theories
of government are always right Yet to some
carping few of ns (who read the daily papers,
say) this sentiment now seems peculiarly ana-
chronistic and irrational. The world to ns is
not very strikingly suggestive of a cosmic gum-
drop variegated by oceans of molasses : we dis-
pute if Omnipotence was ever, at any time, a
confectioner's apprentice: and to us whatever
workmen may have been employed in laying out
that ^' noble and joyous city" appear undoubt-
edly to have gone on strike. So we remember
Mr. Tarkington's own story of Lukens and the
advice therein, when dealing with a popular
novelist, to ^Hreat him with silent contempt or
a brick." And we reflect that Mr. Tarkington
is certainly not a person to be treated with
silent contempt . .

For Mr. Tarkington has not mere talent
but an uncontrollable wizardry that defies con-
cealment, even by the livery of a popular novel-
ist. The winding-up of the William Sylvanus
Baxter stories, for example, is just the species
of necromancy attainable by no other living
author; so that a theatre wherein but now the
humor of sitting upon wet paint and the mirth-
ful aspect of a person vomiting have made

304

THE ARBITERS

their bids for popular applause, is shaken to
its low foundation by the departing rumble of
a '^pompous train," and unsuspected casements
open upon Fairy Land Nor is the ending of
The Turmoil, technically, a whit inferior.
Here, though, with due respect to the recorded
verdict of Mr. W. D. Howells, one does not
''stand on tiptoe'' to reach an effect so beau-
tiful and unpredictable and so eminently ''as
it ought to be." Instead, one is rather inclined
to kneel

For here — ^and in how many other places I —
Mr. Tarkington displays a form of wealth which
should not be exempt from fair taxation. . .
And in fine, it all comes back to this : to write
"best sellers" is by ordinary a harmless and
very often a philanthropic performance ; but in
Mr. Tarkington 's case it is a misappropriation
of funds.

You perceive that Coleridge was perfectly
right — ^"and to be wroth with one we love doth
work like madness in the brain. " Mr. Tarking-
ton is a gentleman whose ability none of us
has any choice save cordially to love, and to
revere. It is for that reason I resent its waste,
and voice my resentment unwillingly. In short,
I throw my brick with one hand, and with the

305

BEYOND LIFE

other remove my hat And to many this wdl
may eeem the inkiest ingratitude, for one half -
moment to b^jndge prosperity and wide ap-
plause to a person who has porveyed so many
enjoyable half -hours. Bnt in oold earnest one
of the most dire calamities that ever befell
American literature was the commercial snceesa
of The Oentleman from Indiama, so closely fol-
lowed by the popular triunqih of Monsieur
Beaucaire. For this double misfortune has
since bred sudi concessions by Mr. Tarldngton,
to the necessity of being ^'pleasant,'' as would
seem amply to justify a remission of that
necessity, at all events among the admirers of
his ability as distinguished from its employ-
ment And the pathos of it all is but augmented
by the circumstance that both of these novels
were quite fine enough to have '^fallen flat,"
and so have left Mr. Tarldngton to write in
rational obscurity a book commensurate with
his intelligence.

^'Is that time deadT— lo, with a littte Penrod
he has but touched the honey of romance" since
then, and thus has very, very slightly dissipated
its saccharinity. Still, we who have read all his
stories with resentful admiration cannot but
hopefully consider the date of Mr. Tarkington's

806

THE ABBITEBS

birth, and reflect that the really incurable op-
tiinism of senility remains a comfortably re-
mote affair. Religion too assures us that there
is always hope for a change of heart, if not for
any actual regaining of the Biblical view —
which, to be sure, is peculiarly ophthalmic as
to the far-and-wide existence of '^good and dear
and beautiful people" and is unlikely ever to
be taken seriously by Americans. No less, the
fact remains that out of forty-nine years of
living Mr« Tarkington has thus far given us
only Seventeen. Nor would this matter were
Mr. Tarkington a Barclay or a Harrison, or
even the mental and artistic equal of the trio's
far more popular rival, Mr. Harold Bell
Wright But Mr. Tarkington had genius.
That is even more tragic than the ^'pleasant"
ejkd^ng oi The Magnificent Amhersons. . .

Thus we approach the master of them aU.
And it is not without— upon the whole — exhil-
arating significance that by long odds the most
popular author typewriting to-day is Mr. Har-
old Bell Wright . . For in this matter of
killing time he stands pre-eminent, like a
David among these chirographic Sauls, and to

307

BEYOND LIFE

their thousands he has slain his ten thaoflanda
of unoecapied half -hoars.

This worthy representative of our popular
standards in reading-matter during the open*
ing years of the twentieth eentory, has been the
target of so much more or less envions ridienle
that to me it has proved almost a pleasure to
read enongh whole pages in his books to dis-
cover that there is absolutely nothing laughable
about Mr. Wright To the contrary, his novels
are masterpieces in the always popular genre
ewnuyeux. A fly-leaf to the van of one of them
asserts that the source of its author's power
'4s the same Ood-given secret that inspired
Shakespeare and upheld Dickens.** But it is
hardly describable as a secret that dullness is
the hall-mark of effident people, in writing as
elsewhere : and however liberal the endowments
which enabled Dickens to write Little Dorrit,
and Shakespeare to make an unfavorable im-
pression on Mr. Shaw, one may reasonably
question if, after all, these writers are the hap-
piest analogues. Indeed, whatever their emi-
nence in other respects, Mr. Wright is beyond
comparison their superior in that especial sort
of tediousness which, above all other natural
gifts, Americans instinctively revere and trust

306

THE ABBITBBS

. • Should proof be seriously demanded that
as a nation we distrust brilliancy, it is always
possible to produce the unanswerable list of our
Presidents, and the Congressional Record also
might be consulted for valuable documentary
evidence. All democratic government, though,
is of course based on the axiom that the man
of average intelligence is in theory equal to a
person of exceptional endowments, and in prac-
tise the superior by reason of numbers: and
that the average man is dull nobody can well
dispute without furnishing a striking example
to offset his contention. . . And for the rest,
there is past doubt a tendency, among the very
dull, to decry dullness, much as millionaires
are prone to assure you that money does not
always make for happiness : but to the conjsid-
erate person a sufficient amount of obtuseness
shows alike as the best possible armor in life's
warfare at large, and the most companionable
of traits in the home-circle, where it unfailingly
flatters one's sense of superiority.

Now Mr. Harold Bell Wright has that unerr-
ing accuracy in catering to the commonplace
which first made vers litre readable, in the
poems of Martin Farquahar Tupper. Nor is it
possible for the most atrabilious contemner of

309

BEYOND LIFE

popular taste to contend that Mr. Wright's
books are badly written, for this author's
avoidance of thought is made dear in perfectly
presentable English, and in at least the style of
its expression compares very creditably with
the average Pastoral Letter.

Through five hundred generous pages his
stories move with never an incongruous taint
of liveliness or wit or imagination, narrating
how the heroine decorously acquired an im-
peccable male admirer, and how the two 4>f
them, after a sufficing number of other calami-
ties, were eventually married to each other.
Money, of course, has come to them in conson-
ance with the financial system of authentic
noveldom, whereby material success is nicely
graduated to everybody's domestic virtues.
Yet in the mean time all well-to-do persons have
proved so uniformly dishonest and contemptible
and dissolute that it is not without misgivings
one leaves the meritorious couple established in
what has been aforetime described as the lap
of luxury: and meanwhile God has been the
subject of a great many complimentary re-
marks. For Mr. Wright's is precisely that
conservative and unblushingly platitudinous
dullness, of which every syllable reeks with

310

THE ARBITERS

''wholesome sentiment/' such as we take com-
fort to see represented in our senate-chambers,
and to nod under en Sabbath mornings, and to
retail to our helpless children. There is no
walk in life in which this especial form of hebe-
tude is not assured of meeting with respectful
attention: and its claim to be esteemed a liter-
ary merit is, at the very worst, quite as well-
founded as its age-old privilege to grace the
rostrum and adorn the vestry.

It may well be the multitudinous readers of
Mr. Wright who are our true art critics. They
independently appraise that which they read.
For they alone without any amazement recog-
nize that the purpose of art is, not at all to
record adroitly some personal or purloined idea
in paint or clay or carbon-copies, but to evoke
this idea in the brain-cells of other people ; and
that when art does not do this the artist has
failed. . . It is not unsalutary to test one of
them, with Walter Pater, say, — ^''To bum al-
ways with this gem-like flame, to maintain this
ecstasy, is success in life," and so on. To the
general reader the first clause suggests, if any-
thing, Gehenna, &nd the second, habitual in-
toxication; neither of which impresses him as
a likely avenue to the bank-account and lim-

311

BEYOND LIFE

ousine that brevet success in life: and more-
over, he will point out with perfect justice that
flameSy whatever else they may be, are not
''gem-like/' It matters little whether there-
after, in his figurative vernacular, he decrees
this ** high-brow stuflf^' to be over his head or
beneath consideration : by either trope he voices
the fact that it has missed him, and the ques-
tion, after all, is one of markmanship.

Here Pater's artifice, in short, has failed to
create art: for the idea has not been trans-
ferred. The artifice of Mr. Harold Bell
Wright, however, such as it is, has sped true
as an arrow to the reader's prejudices. The
story, unquestionably, is rather stupid, with
something of the staleness of last week's news-
paper: but imperfect human nature humbjy
recognizes, in the light of experience, that it is
always bored by sustaining improvement.
Moreover, you must remember that, as sug-
gested elsewhere, the general reader does not
turn to fiction with any expectation of positive
pleasure, but with the less ambitious aspiration
of killing time : he takes up a book when tli^re
is nothing else conceivable to do, and then only.
For the rest, it is generally conceded that all
rich people lead deplorable private lives, of

812

THE ABBITEBS

which the more said the better as tonohes the
interest of that supplement to the Sunday paper
wherein the fashionable scandals of the read-
ing-matter appropriately consort with the cal-
umnies of the photographer. Then, too, that
high-minded artizans possessing fine heads of
hair invariably fade from observation in the
embrace of opulence and feminine arms, is a
well-known phenomenon susceptible of instant
proof through a visit to the nearest cinemato-
grapL And finally, the man and the girl vie
with each other in discoursing ^'wholesome sen-
timent/' and are such sweet and noble char-
acters as the reader always knew existed some-
where, and is going to emulate to-morrow or, at
any rate, next month: for he, too, can procras-
tinate as amiably as far more cultured persons.
And he, too, has his dim notion of men ''as they
ought to be.'' . .

The general reader, in a word, is punctili-
ously following Pater's exhortation, however
unintentionally; and is deriving that noble
pleasure which comes from exercising the high-
est reach of your endowments. It is the pleas-
ure one man derives from writing the Second
Part of Fimst, and another from playing chess,
— ^the pleasure of using the finest part of your

313

BEYOND LIFE

mind, such as it is, to its fullest extent, what-
ever that may happen to be. Where Mr. Wright
can rouse ttds pleasure it is thus with perfect
justice that Mr. Wright is greeted as a serious
and successful artist And this truth is in no
way affected by the limited number of endow-
ments possessed, and therefore brought to ex-
ercise, by the general reader: as I just pointed
out in speaking of Queed, a mediocre book alone
can bring out that which is best in a mediocre
person: and a race-horse may very conscienti-
ously enjoy and take credit for his work with-
out qualms over his failure to have been bom
a centipede.

So when all is done, '^Now, that's what I call
a pretty good story," says the general reader,
intrepidly appraising his own reading-matter.
He thereby proves as indisputably that Mr.
Wright is really an artist as that he himself is
a competent art-critic. . . For in most cases,
this unarrogant verdict records the fact that yet
another book has momentarily evoked belief
that— by and large — ^the Recording Angel is
writing a pretty good story. A rather tawdry
book has roused the speaker (as no amount of
judicious writing could ever hope to do) from
that workaday existence which is common to

314

THE AEBITEBS

monkixidi — made up of tedious niiiiuportaiit
tasks and useless little habits, — ^to proud as-
surance that life is not a blind and aimless busi-
ness, not all a hopeless waste and confusion:
and that he himself, however gross and weak
an animal in the revelation of his past antics,
will presently be strong and excellent and wise,
and his existence a pageant. And to create this
assurance is the purpose of all art. • • And in
life, of course, the demiurgic spirit of romance
induces this dynamic illusion in every moment
of lif e, since without it men to-day would not
consent to live. I need hardly say that in pro-
moting any and all illusions romance has no
more potent ally, anywhere, than dullness. • .

So we attain the reassuring conclusion that
the arbiters, both as to the popular appeal and
as to the ultimate survival of any book, are our
general human inadequacy and our general hu-
man resolution never to acknowledge this in-
adequacy. For our dullness and our vanity —
as you perceive, I trust, by this? — are the de-
pendable arbiters of every affair in human life.
And luckily for us, they bid fair, too, to be the
arbiters of life's final outcome.

815

BEYOND LIFE

Through a merciful dispensation, we are one
and all of us created very vain and very dull:
and by utilizing these invaluable qualities the
demiurgic spirit of romance will yet contrive
a world *'as it ought to be.*' Vanity it is that
pricks us indef atigably to play the ape to every
dream romance induces; yet vanity is but the
stirrup-cup : and urgent need arises that human
dullness retain us (as it does) securely blinded,
lest we observe the wayside horrors of our
journey and go mad One moment of dear
vision as to man's plight in the universe would
be quite sufficient to set the most philosophic
gibbering. Meanwhile with bandaged eyes we
advance: and human sanity is guarded by the
brave and pitiable and tireless dullness of man-
kind. • • Yet note how varied are the amiable
activities of human dullness, which tend alike
to protect and to enliven human progress I
Dullness it is, of course, that brews and quaffs
Dutch courage in the form of popular novels,
and hoards its ' 'literary classics,'' as senti-
mental persons treasure old letters (because
this faded writing once was necromancy), in a
very rarely visited attic. . . But dullness, too,
it is that fosters salutary optimism as to the
destiny of mankind, in flat defiance of every-

316

THE ARBITERS

thing mankind can do, and does nnblushingly.
And dnllness likewise nnrtnres all our general
faith in the peculiar sanctity of anything which
one has seen done often enough, and our rever-
ence for whatever is sufficiently hackneyed;
since dullness, naturally, ascribes no slight im-
portance to itself . . . Then, too, how magnani-
mously does dullness, in you and me and our
moonstruck compeers, dispose of its one fervent
scudding moment of ability to do anything at
all, by devoting it to the creation of ^^art"; so
that some erroneous impression, based upon the
talebearing of five perfidious senses (and pain-
fully worked out to a non sequitur, by the rattle-
trap mechanism of an ^'artist's" lop-sided
brain), may be preserved for posterity's mis-
guidance and well-being. In graver circles,
dullness — sometimes mitred, sometimes erup-
tive with forensic platitudes, and at its most
terrible with a black cap adorning its inertia, —
invents and codifies religion, and makes eupho-
nious noises about ''right" and ''wrong/' as
an ornate and stately method of imposing the
local by-laws. Equally among those flavored
mortals whom the income tax annoys does a
kindred form of dullness become axiomatic
about common-sense and "being practical,'' as

317

BEYOND LIFE

the impedimenta peculiarly requisite to wing*
less bipeds when left to their own devices
among much non-committal stardrif t. • • Dull-
ness it is that, signally, esteems itself well
worthy of perpetuation ; and in the action seeks
to love, in the quite staggering faith that pres-
ently by some human being of the opposite sex
love will be merited. And finally dullness it is
that lifts up heart and voice alike^ to view a
parasite infesting the epidermis of a midge
among the planets, and cries, Behold, this is the
child of Ood AU-mighty and AU-worshipful,
made in the likeness of his Father I • * These
and how many other wholesome miracles are
daily brought about by our dullness, by our
brave and pitiable and tireless dullness, by our
really majestic dullness, in firm alliance with
the demiurgic spirit of romance. • . But upon
these amiable activities I shall dilate no further,
lest you declare my encomiums somewhat less
adequately to praise the dullness of mankind
than to illustrate it: yet you perceive, I trust,
that our dullness is our one quite priceless pos-
session.

And so it is dullness alone which enables us
to hurl defiance at '^realism'': for these illu-
sions that are bom of romance, and are nursed

318

THE AEBITEES

by dullness, serve as our curveting and prancing
escort, and keep at bay all interference, as we
pass in a straggling caravan, with death
already hot upon the trail, and human nature
clogging every step like gyves. And thus pro-
tected, to-day as always, our caravan accepts
romance for guide; and strains and flounders
toward goals which stay remote, and yet are
fairly discernible. For that to ^hich romance
conducts, in all the affairs of life (concluded
John Charteris), is plain enough,— distinction
and clarity, and beauty and symmetryi and ten-
derness and truth and urbanity.

319

WHEREIN WE AWAIT

921

—There was a deal said, sir — ^what with one thing
leading to another, as it wer»— Imt no great harm done
after alL

— ^And no good ^ther, 70a may depend upon it^ Dal>-
nej. . . . There is never any good comes of intermin-
able palavering. . . This is a ease that calls for aetion,
and for instant action, bj George 1

— Jnst as 70a saj, sir, no doubt And jret — well, in a
manner of speaking, sir, and considering eveiTthing—
why, what on earth is anjbodj able to dof

—I am snre I don't know. Bat that does not in tfia
least alter the prindple of the thing.

322

Wherein We Await

HEBE for a moment John Charteris
ceased talking. He, at least, seemed
not fatigued: but the venerable tall
dock behind him again had asthmatically
cleared its throat; and now, in thin nnresonant
tones, which suggested the beating of a pencil
on the bottom of a tin pan, was striking five : so
Charteris had paused, provisionally. And I
seized the chance.

Said I:

— So here we are back again precisely where
we started, with a strained pose upon the same
half-truth. Now, Charteris, suppose you let me
talkaUttlel

His hands went out in a wide gesture of mag-
nanimity. • .

I continued:

— ^Where is one to begin, though I . . Well,
I shall generously say at outset that not in a
long time have I heard a discourse so insincere.
It is an apology for romance by a man who be-
lieves that romance is dead beyond resurrec-

323

BEYOND LIFE

tidn; and who^ considers therefore that to ro-
manoe may be attributed every imaginabla
virtue, without any imaginable consequencea.
It is a tissue of wild errors, deceitfully glossed
with the unreasonableness of a person who is
really in earnest; so that, I confess, I was at
first quite taken in, and fancied you to be la-
menting with honest grief the world's lost
youth.

SaidCharteris:

— ^Ah, but who can with honesty lament the
passing of youth t No, youth remains current
everywhere, though, like all other forms of cur-
rency, its only value is that it purchases some-
thing else. For the rest, far from deploring
that our present-day reading-matter is no
longer youthful, I have just voiced unfeigned
regret that it is childish.

— ^But, my dear Gharteris, consider soberly
this conceit of yours I Of course, I must pro-
test that you have been shamefully unfair with
"realism** throughout: for however pleasingly
you have defined romance — ^by implication, at
least— you have left "realism** indeterminate
after so many hours of abusing it.

Gharteris shrugged: but he said nothing.

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And I continued my effort to bring him to
reason:

— ^Indeed, your major and minor premises
seem to ran ihua : romance in literatnre is that
method, governed by that viewpoint, in which
resides all virtue ; and '^realism'' is precisely the
reverse. To your hearer you leave the comple-
tion of this imperfect syllogism. Now tljat is
an excellent way to convince the unwary: it is,
on the other hand, a poor method of discovering
truth.

John Charteris said:

—If I indeed left << realism'^ indeterminate,
it was merely because I hesitated to define the
unmentionable. ''Realism"— not only in writ-
ing, but in every one of its evincements — ^is the
fallacy that our mile-posts are as worthy of con-
sideration as our goal; and that the espedal
post we are now passing reveals an eternal ver-
ity. As a matter of fact, mile-posts by ordinary
reveal the pretensions of a tradesman who be-
lieves in advertising, — ^which very possibly
accounts for the manner of our more generally
esteemed ''realists,'* in every field of human
action. So "realism'' too becomes an art of
sorts, a minor art like music or hair-dressing.

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<< Realism'' is the art of being snperfioial seri-
ously.

— ^Permit me^ Charteris, none the less, to re-
state yonr principal thesis as it concerns the
writer's craft —

Now, cnrionsly enongh, the little novelist ap-
peared vexed

— ^My dear fellow, my very dear fellow (John
Charteris inquired, with careful and laborious
patience), but have I really seemed to you to-
night to be talking about books and how books
should be writtent For in that event, I have
failed very disastrously. My target was not
at all 'literary." Instead, I have attempted
to expound man's proper attitude toward the
universe he temporarily infests; and to show
you that this must always be a purely romantio
attitude which is in no wise concerned with
facts. Yes, I can but repeat my golden rule for
aesthetic conduct: there should be no trifling
with facts.

— ^But, Charteris, from the very beginning
you have been talking about books and the
makers of books —

John Charteris shook his head. He declared:

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— ^It is discottraging: but the wounds of a
friend are proverbially f aithf nL I have talked
for a not inconsiderable while, with perfect
honesty and the best of my ability: and the np*
shot is that my andience evinces no least shad-
owy comprehension of what I have been talking
about. The writer's craft, qnotha!

But without heeding the grimaces of Char-
teris, I went on rationally :

— ^Romance, I infer, is the expression of an
attitude whidi views life with profound dis-
trust, as a business of exceeding dullness and
of very little worth; and which therefore seeks
for beauty by an abandonment of the facts of
living. Living is a drab transaction, a concat-
enation of unimportant events: man is impo-
tent and aimless: beauty, and indeed all the
fine things which you desiderate in literature —
and in ^our personal existence, I suspect— are
nowherb attainable save in imagination. To
the problem of living, romance propounds the
only possible answer, which is, not understand-
ing, but escape. And the method of that escape
is, you imply, the creation of a pleasing dream,
which will somehow engender a reality as love-
ly. So romance in literature invents its
''dynamic illusions'' — ^Ibsen called them vital

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lies, did he nott — ^to the sole end that manldnd
may play Peter Ibbetson upon a cosmic scale.
This I take to be the doctrine of yoor Econom-
ists.

— Oh^ but continue, pray I said Charteris.
Continue, since you are bent upon reducing all
my wasted eloquence to a lecture on novel-
writing I

— Well, I shall avoid the obvious comment
that your viewpoint outdoes in pessimism the
ugliest vision of the '^ realist"; and that it has
its root in cowardice; and, finally, that it pre-
sents the difficulty which Mr. Gilbert Chester-
ton once voiced, — That what is wrong with the
world is that no man can say what would be
right with it. This applies to Sophocles as poig-
nantly as to John Charteris. Nor will I insist
that very often what you have regarded as
beautiful I with equal conviction have deemed
merely pretty.

— ^I am confuted, John Charteris replied, in
that any unmade comment is unanswerable. . .
Otherwise, I would agree that quite obviously
the world is made uninhabitable by the density
of its inhabitants. I might even, very rudely,
cite contiguous evidence. . . As for cowardice,
I might point out that clear thinking is every-

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where indoctrinated by that instructor who
alone can teach the tortoise to run, and the
cornered rat to fight, and hmnan beings to be
rational And had you vocally denied my doc-
trines on the ground of their ugliness, I would
have flung full in your face earthquakes and
cloudbursts and hyenas and rhinoceroses and
diseases and germs and intellectual women ; and
the unlovable senility of aged persons, which
converts the very tenderest affection into re-
signed endurance of its object as an unavoid-
able nuisance ; and the cruel and filthy process
of birth; and the unspeakable corruption of
death: and I would have given you untram-
meled leave to deduce from the ugliness of these
things that they are all untrue. . . But since
you graciously keep silence, so must L

— ^All that, my friend, is equivocation pure
and simple. However, let me defer your
quibble for a moment, Charteris. For I want
to point out with emphatic seriousness one
quality which you have overlooked in catalog-
ing the desirable ingredients of literature —

— But literature is really not, I must submit
with Gautier, a sort of soup stock, which one

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may flavor to every individnal taste by putting
this and that into the pot

— ^You have said, then, Charteris, that these
are the anctorial virtues par excellence: dis-
tinction and clarity, beauty and synunetry, and
tenderness and truth and urbanity. These are
good, I grant : and it may be upon a mere matter
of words that we differ. Yet it seems to me
that all books have been made re-readable
through the possession, not of these qualities
alone, but of one other which is salt to them
all — ^and that quality is gusto.

— ^You employ an excellent sonorous word,
conceded Charteris. And perhaps to you this
use of it may even seem to have some meaningf
— ^Why, to me it appears that all enduring
books, of however delicate a texture, have pos-
sessed a-— well, we will say, a heartiness akin
to the smacking of lips over a good dish. It is
not joy, for many joyless writers have dis-
played it; and it is often inherent in the black-
est of tragedies. It is not ecstasy, although to
ecstasy it may approach. I think it is almost
a physical thing: it certainly involves a com-
plete surrender to life, and an absorption of
one's self in the functions of being. It is a
drunkenness of the soul, perhaps: it is allied

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to that fierce pain and joy which we call ecstatic
living, and which the creative artist must al*
ways seek to reproduce in his work, just as
does every adequately existing person still re-
produce it now and tiien in corporal life — ^and
whether through gross sins or high-flown abne-
gations is, to the artist at least, quite inunate-
rial. Yes, gusto, I would say, is the very life-
blood of art: and solely by the measure of art's
possession of what I have called gusto does art
overtop life, when art is able to distill the
quintessence of that which in reality is always
more or less transitory and alloyed.

John Charteris said:

— ^Undoubtedly I failed to stipulate that the
creative artist should write with what you de-
scribe as ^^ gusto'': indeed, I would as soon have
thought of suggesting that he write with his
hand For the sole point upon which fine liter-
ature and reading-matter and all the uncon-
tested axioms of mankind are quite at one, is
in assuming mankind to be superhuman.
Through this protective instinct the artist will
as an affair of course, in his depiction of human
beings, exaggerate everything. All passions,
naturally, will be studied by him, as with a
microscope, whereunder men's emotions will

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figure as untamed leviathans that ramp quite
awe-inspiringly.

Now Charteris was so outrageously pervert-
ing my meaning that I would have interrupted
him. But he continued:

— ^No, you and I can differ but upon the ques-
tion as to whether in corporal life some '^ade-
quately existing person" does now and then
reproduce anything of this sort With the
wide-spread tradition that he does we ought to
deal as open-mindedly as with the equally well-
known myth of George and the Dragon or of the
Cat and the Fiddle. No doubti one might infer,
once more upon advisement of the moming-
paper, that no longer ago than yesterday a re-
spectable number of not at all respectable
people were brought through the indulgence
of some such ''gusto" into publicity and police-
stations: but, even in pursuit of a really ''ade-
quate" scheme of living, one hesitates to accept
these folk as patterns : and the wiser of us will
not quite thus tumultuously rush into the dock.
Fpr to comparatively intelligent persons self-
control is a more common and less difficult vir-
tue than any intelligent person would dream of
admitting. Passion does not rouse the vast
majority of us to any outbreak, or even to elo-

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quence: perhaps, indeed, nothing can ever do
that save dread of public opinion. In purely
personal matters the disheartening fact is that
we encounter crises with commonplaces, and
the important scenes of one's life are rendered
inefficiently, at their only performance. How
can this be otherwise, when all the while we are
vexatiously aware that our emotions are unfit
to the occasion t For it is the actual reflection
of every considerate person at the climax of
some great joy or crime or grief, that his emo-
tion is neither so fine nor so absorbing as he
had anticipated It follows, of course, that
everyone of us is forever after resolute to con-
ceal this failure, especially from himself. . .
So it is not quite for the reason which you ad-
vance that I accept your dictum as to art's over-
topping life through art's ability to distill the
quintessence of that which, in ephemeral real-
ity, is transitory and alloyed. Still, I accept it

— ^My dear Charteris, I really must in passing
congratulate you upon your retention of youth.
I had thought it the peculiar privilege of im-
maturity to view mankind and God with doleful
eyes. But here am I, quick with the wisdom

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of my generation, compelled to shout denial of
yonr doctrines from comparatively roseate
heights, for all that you are by some twenty-
two years my senior, and your opinions ought
in consequence to be already gilded by a setting
sun. Instead, you appraise earth in the dumps.
. . Well, I let pass that pose, out of commingled
respect for its antiquity and youthfulness.
Meanwhile, I do agree with you when you say
all enduring literature in tiie past has been
of the romantic quality you describe, from what-
ever various standpoints this quality has been
apprehended. And it is true that surface
faithfulness alone, such as many modem novel-
ists seek to achieve, is the emptiest of artistic
aims. I even grant you it is better to lie pleas-
ingly. . • Indeed, despite your wilful blindness
as to the true value of "realism," your slurs
upon the practised methods of producing '^ real-
istic" art compose a valuable recipe. It is
merely because I think you have ignored some
essentials that I venture, upon this subject also,
to be banal. Bear with me, then, while I recite
a modest credo of my own. . . I too believe
it is more important that literature should be
true to life than that it should inventory life's
mannerisms. I believe we can never be con-

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cemed by any man or woman in a book if we
do not— at least while the book's spell is on ns— »
put very cordial faith in that person's exis-
tence, and share in the emotional atmosphere
of the scene. But I likewise believe that the
illusion of reality can be produced by the ro*
mantio or the '^realistic'' method, either one,
or even by the two commingled, provided al-
ways that the artist, given insight, is sincerely
striving to show f midamental things as he sees
them, and thereby, perhaps, to hint at their true
and miknowable nature.

— ^Ah, but (said Charteris) I have freely con-
ceded that this illusion can be produced in many
cases even by the Wright method. It is merely
a question of how much intelligence the reader
lacks. For the rest, your "if has somewhat
the impressive vacuity of an address to C'^n-
gress. Were I inclined to daring metaphor, I
would suggest that your cloudy **if " ambigu-
ously wreathes the black hole of "realism"
with such vaporings as ordinarily emanate
from a white house.

—Weill then I mouth my platitudes in very
respectable company. Whereas you— but just
consider whither you would lead us with your
Economist doctrines — say, with your doctrine of

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original dallneBsl Grant that man is as in-
adequate as yon please, and living as unevent-
fnl: no less, the jogtrot way is sometimes illn-
mined and is made angast by flashes struck from
midnights (to pervert Browning to my own
uses), and still even the most humble of us
have our exalted moments. And these mo-
ments, I contend, it is the business of the artist,
romanticist and '* realist'' alike, to interpret
for us and, if he can, to evaluate them in terms
of approximate eternity.

— ^It is just possible, John Gharteris sug-
gested, that the poor dear man may fall a shade
short of omniscience. I at least have encoun-
tered writers with this defect, although none, of
course, who was conscious of it . . And I
forbear to inquire as to the no doubt interesting
process of evaluating anything in ^' terms of ap-
proximate eternity," simply because this also
sounds delightfully presidential, and suggests
the swish of Mrs. Partington's not uncelebrated
broom. On second thought, though, I retract
the "presidential": your words are such stuff
as deans are made on.

To Charteris I nodded now in, cordial assent.
Said I:

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— ^Perverted proverbs are a little old-fash-
ioned^ aren't they, nowadays? Still, I hail
gladly both your fleering analogues. For art
is truly ^^a branch of pedagogy,'' because the
artist is a£Sliated to priesthood. To only a few
of us is it given, or desirable, to see within.
The majority must for practical purposes dis-
sever dreams from the business of existence:
dreams are not our metier, and that is all there
is to it Yet since it is our nature to learn by
parables, we turn to the artist who is also a
seer, in search of entertainment, and more or
less consciously hoping to acquire understand-
ing. . . What does it matter, then, the seer's
*' method"? You should remember Chante-
cler's experience with ** methods." No, whether
the seer's text be some impartially considered
facts about John Jones, or whether he clothe
his puppets with such a bright and exquisite
tissue of prevarication as enmeshes the person-
ality of King Arthur or Jeanne Dare or Lee
or Lincohi, or any other high-minded figment
of patriotic self-complacency— this "method,"
I repeat, must always stay a circumstance of
conspicuous unimportance. We merely ask
that our story treat of such a man as captures
our attention; and that through the lights and

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ahadowB of his fortunes may glimmer some-
thing like an answer to the great question which
I can only word as "What is it all up tot"
Yes, that is really the one thing we need to
know about the universe, nowadays: and our
need is heavy and quenchless. . • You see, my
creed says nothing about "style/' and makes
no caustic remarks as to the taste of my fellow
citizens. But you are none the less aware of
how firm my faith is in the axiom that the best of
"styles'' is the simplest and the least affected:
and I believe that saying applies with equal
truth to the best of our fellow citizens. For the
rest, I would merely express the "reaction" to
that portion of your talk which touches on the
writer's craft, by one who — ^let us say — ^is in-
stantly aware of his preference for Thackeray
whenever anybody mentions Dickens; and who
comprehends without bitterness that it is the
business of the author, and not of the public,
to see that the distinction between literature
and reading-matter be rendered less invidious,
by proving that literature may be both. For I
know that what is one man's inspiration is an-
other's soporific; and that to the fellow crafts-
man only is the craftsman's skill apparent; and
that, no less, when one person anywhere has

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voiced a tonic truth or some great-hearted lie
(for these are really truths in embryo), that
utterance must quite inevitably become what
is both less and more than literature: for it
will be in time a commonplace of daily speech
among the simplest and the least affected peo-
ple; and so will live when countless master-
pieces and their makers are forgotten.

Again John Charteris grimaced. He spread
those eloquent soft hands of his, palms upward.

He said:

— Thus you afl&rm that art is an impor-
tant form of religion; while I have pointed out
that religion i9 one of the loveliest forms of
art. Our final difference is, let us say, but one
of terms— which are quite possibly * * of approxi-
mate eternity." So let us leave them, then,
agreeing simply that art and religion are kin-
dred. • . And truly as to the origin of either
what man can utter anything save his guesses f
None now remembers who first thought of any
god: all the creators of religion are become un-
honored dust; and it is only the anthologists,
such as Buddha and Mohammed and Zoroaster
and Christ and Moses and Confucius, who have

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bequeathed imperishable names to serve as
weapons for the weak^ as well as for the fool
and the fanatic So it has always been in every
field of artistic creation. Indeed, a very cogent
proof that art is akin to religion lies in the fact
that, will you or nill you, you contribute to the
welfare of some form of each. In each the only
feasible way to attack a tenet is to found a
schism: so that even atheists and the contribu-
tors to magazines must perforce adhere to their
common creed, of denying plausibility to per-
sonal creation. . . Moreover, religion and art
alone take tender care of their unprofitable
servants. Thus for the clergy who find Chris-
tian tenets impracticable there are always
bishoprics: whereas it is the sure reward of
every unsuccessful artist that he shall be for-
gotten, and so shall be no longer inadequate.
Say that his vision founders in the form of a
book I Well, the man passes; and the milk of
human kindness obliterates the ink he spat-
tered. But a few of his words, and of the words
of many other men who failed as literary
artists, will be repeated and re-echoed, in idle
hearthside talk, because there is something in
them, though not very much: and presently
time will bring forth the brain to fuse, and the

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tongue to titter, all these old disregarded little
sayings in harmony. And then these men will
have become a legendary whole : and each life's
work will live, despite its failure, and will sur-
vive if but as a half -sentence or as some happy
phrase. That outcome certainly is not prodi-
gious. But then these fragments will live on
eternally; and Shakespeare's lordliest fancy
can hardly hope to do much more. These frag-
ments will not be pondered over; and they will
never wring tears and themes from schoolboys :
but they will be as threads in the stuff of which
dreams are woven. In this much all shall serve
the demiurgic spirit of romance: and even the
feeble hand that failed, and the vain ambition
which pitiably wrought its own burlesque, shall
aid to shape dynamic illusions; and so in time
will create resJity.

— ^These, Charteris, are very certainly what
Captain Fluellen was wont to commend for
being '^as prave words as you shall see in a
smnmer 's day. ' ' But I fancy they are not much
more. And so, I give you over as incorrigible.

Now Charteris leaned back in his revolving
chair, so that it creaked and tilted. His arms
went up behind his head, in a long stretching
gesture, and he yawned luxuriously. He said:

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— But is not to be given over by one's friends
the inevitable price of speaking the tongue of
angels? I really wish yon wonld not interrupt
my periods. . . For, as I was going on to re-
mark, by the elect anthologist will be pursued
all the auctorial virtues : distinction and darity,
and beauty and symmetry^ and tenderness and
truth and urbanity. Thus it has been since the
moon's nonage. And as I began by saying a
few minutes ago, I believe that to-day» as al-
ways, it is only through the exerciQe of these
virtues that any man may in reason attempt to
insure his books against oblivion's voracity. • .
But was it indeed a few moments ago that I
began f . .

Charteris rose and pushed open one of the
shutters. He stood thus, peering out into the
green recesses of his garden, and blinking in a '
flood of clear gray light that showed him curi-
ously sallow and withered and futile looking.

— ^Upon my word, said he, it is morning. I
must have talked all night. And the dawn of
this new day discovers me, after so many divi-
gations, just where I started yesterday. Yes,
it admits of any number of moral deductions. • •

For I have talked all night: and you have
not even suspected what I was talking about.

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I have spoken of the deminrgio spirit of ro-
mance, which by ca joUng our inestimable vanity
and doUness controls all human lif e, and profi-
tably utilizes every blunder of human life ; and
I have spoken of existence from the one view-
point which reveals in human life some possible
significance: and all the while you believed that
I was trying to voice my personal theory as to
how novels ought to be written I Well, perhaps
that is about as near as any one of us can ever
come to understanding another: and even
though the reflection has its dispiriting aspect,
it strikingly exposes the futility of my talking
further. That circumstance, at least, should be
consolatory. . .

So I have wearied the night with much vain
speech; and neither rhetoric nor candor has
availed me anything. Yes, it admits of a vast
number of moral deductions: but I prefer to
regard myself symbolically, as an epitome of
all mankind. For each of us is babbling in the
night, and has no way to make his fellows un-
derstand just what he would be at It may be
there is some supernal audience which sees and
hears with perfect comprehensiont Yes, such
of course may be the case. But in that event

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I shudder to think of how we must provoke
and bore that audience. . .

Meanwhile (continued John Gharteris) it is
strange to look out upon that quiet-colored
place of vacant lawns and undulating f oliage^
where there appears to be no living thing any-
where save those querulous birds. Everywhere
it is a world of wavering verdancy, a twilit
world without any shadows or sharp fall of sun
rays, a world such as we attribute to the mer-
folk undersea— or, say, to the witch-woman's
occupancy. It is only my familiar garden, but
this trick of light estranges it . . At dawn
you have the Chivalrous sense of being in a
place that is not home, and wherein something
is expected of you. Then, too, at dawn you
have a sense of imminent destiny, and feel that
what is going to happen to you is very generally
foreknown. Birds shrill of it, and it is about
this the trees hold conference, and the placid
sun seems to have risen to find how far the
matter has progressed. Eh, I am helpless in an
ambiguous place, — ^I and all my fellows, whom
I may not, quite, understand, — ^and there is no
escape from this unalterably ordered proces-

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sion of sound and noise and color^ save through
death. And I do not know what death means,
either. . . So I shall presently eat breakfast
and enjoy it, and look over the morning-paper
with interest, and then get to writing and find
pleasure in that too, — ^I, who am under this in-
evitable sentence to a fate at which I cannot
guess I It is in such a predicament that I find
time to think seriously about literature, and to
prattle about literature, and to ask this and that
of literature, quite as if books or anything else
could possibly matter, while that impends which
is going to happen to me, — ^that unpredictable
outcome of affairs which the dawn knows about
For very certainly at dawn there is abroad
some force which foreknows all things. I sense
its nearness and its contemplation of me, and
I am frightened. • •

Meanwhile yon voice a truth I had not hith-
erto perceived: I ask of literature precisely
those things of which I feel the lack in my own
life. I appeal for charity, and implore that
literature afford me what I cannot come by in
myself. . .

For I want distinction for that existence

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which ought to be peculiarly mine, among my
innumerable fellows who swarm about earth
like ants. Yet which one of us is noticeably, or
can be appreciably different, in this throng of
human ephemeras and all their millions and in-
estimable millions of millions of predecessors
and oncoming progeny? And even though one
mote may transiently appear exceptional, the
distinction of those who in their heydays are
"great" personages — ^much as the Emperor of
Lilliput overtopped his subjects by the breadth
of Captain Gulliver's nail,— must suffer loss
with time, and must dwindle continuously, until
at most the man's recorded name remains here
and there in sundry pedants' libraries. There
were how many dynasties of Pharaohs, each
one of whom was absolute lord of the known
world, and is to-day forgotten t Among the
countless popes who one by one were adored as
the regent of Heaven upon earth, how many
persons can to-day distinguish f and does not
time breed emperors and czars and presidents as
plentiful as blackberries, and as little thought
of when their season is out! For there is no
perpetuity in human endeavor : we strut upon a
quicksand: and all that any man may do for
good or ill is presently forgotten, because it

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does not matter. I wail to a familiar tone, of
coarse, in this lament for the evanescence of
human grandeur and the perishable renown
of kings. And indeed to the statement that
imperial CsBsar is turned to day and Mizraim
now cures wounds, and that in short Queen
Anne is dead, we may agree lightly enough;
for it is, after all, a matter of no personal con-
cern; but how hard it is to concede that the
banker and the rector and the traffic-officer, to
whom we more immediately defer, and we our-
selves, and the little gold heads of our children,
may be of no importance, either 1 . . In art it
may so happen that the thing which a man
makes endures to be misunderstood and gab-
bled over: yet it is not the man himself. We
retain the Iliad, but oblivion has swallowed
Homer so deep that many question if he ever
existed at alL • • So we pass as a cloud of
gnats, where I want to live and be thought of,
if only by myself, as a distinguishable entity.
And such distinction is impossible in the long
progress of suns, whereby in thought to sepa-
rate the personality of any one man from all
others that have lived, becomes a task to stagger
Omniscience. . .
I want my life, the only life of which I am

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assured, to have symmetry or, in default of
that, at least to acquire some clarity. Surely it
is not asking very much to wish that my per-
sonal conduct be intelligible to me I Yet it is
forbidden to know for what purpose this uni-
verse was intended, to what end it was set
a-going, or why I am here, or even what I had
preferably do while here. It vaguely seems to
me that I am expected to perform an allotted
task, but as to what it is I have no notion. . .
And indeed, what have I done hitherto, in the
years behind me? There are some books to
show as increment, as something which was
not anywhere before I made it, and which even
in bulk will replace my buried body, so that my
life will be to mankind no loss materially.
But the course of my life, when I look back, is
as orderless as a trickle of water that is diverted
and guided by every pebble and crevice and
grass-root it encounters. I seem to have done
nothing with pre-meditation, but rather, to have
had things done to me. Aad for all the rest
of my life, as I know now, I shall have to shave
every morning in order to be ready for no
more than this I . . I have attempted to make
the best of my material circumstances always;
nor do I see to-day how any widely varying

348

WE AWAIT

course could have been wiser or even feasible :
but material things have nothing to do with
that life which moves in me. Why, then, should
they direct and heighten and provoke and curb
every action of life? It is against the tyranny
of matter I would rebel, — against life's abso-
lute need of food, and books, and fire, and cloth-
ing, and flesh, to touch and to inhabit, lest life
perish. . . No, all that which I do here or
refrain from doing lacks clarity, nor can I de-
tect any symmetry anywhere, such as living
would assuredly display, I think, if my progress
were directed by any particular motive. . . It
is all a muddling through, somehow, without
any recognizable goal in view, and there is no
explanation of the scuffle tendered or anywhere
procurable. It merely seems that to go on liv-
ing has become with me a habit. . .

And I want beauty in my life. I have seen
beauty in a sunset and in the spring woods and
in the eyes of divers women, but now these
happy accidents of light and color no longer
thrill me. And I want beauty in my life itself,
rather than in such chances as befall it. It
. seems to me that many actions of my life were
beautiful, very long ago, when I was young
in an evanished world of friendly girls, who

349

BEYOND LIFE

were all more lovely than any girl is nowadays.
For women now are merely more or less good-
looking, and as I know, their looks when at
their best have been painstakingly enhanced
and edited . . But I would like this life which
moves and yearns in me, to be able itself to
attain to comeliness, though but in transitory
performance. The life of a butterfly, for ex-
ample, is just a graceful gesture: and yet, in
that its loveliness is complete and perfectly
rounded in itself, I envy this bright flicker
through existence. And the nearest I can come
to my ideal is punctiliously to pay my bills, be
polite to my wife, and contribute to deserving
charities: and the programme does not seem,
somehow, quite adequate. There are my books,
I know; and there is beauty ^^ embalmed and
treasured up'' in many pages of my books, and
in the books of other persons, too, which I may
read at will: but this desire inborn in me is
not to be satiated by making marks upon paper,
nor by deciphering them. . . In short, I am
enamored of that flawless beauty of wbich all
poets have perturbedly divined the existence
somewhere, and which life as men know it
simply does not afford nor anywhere fore-
see. . .

350

WE AWAIT

And tenderness, too— but does that appear
a mawkish thing to desiderate in life? Well,
to my finding human beings do not like one
another. Indeed, why should they, being
rational creatures? All babies have a tempo-
rary lien on tenderness, of course: and there-
from children too receive a dwindling income,
although on looking back, you will recollect that
your childhood was upon the whole a lonesome
and much put-upon period. But all grown per-
sons ineffably distrust one another. . . In
courtship, I grant you, there is a passing aber-
ration which often mimics tenderness, some-
times as the result of honest delusion, but more
frequently as an ambuscade in the endless
struggle between man and woman. Married
people are not ever tender with each other, you
will notice : if they are mutually civil it is much :
and physical contacts apart, their relation is
that of a very moderate intimacy. My own
wife, at all events, I find an unfailing mystery,
a Sphinz whose secrets I assume to be not worth
knowing: and, as I am mildly thankful to nar-
rate, she knows very little about me, and evinces
as to my affairs no morbid interest. That is
not to assert that if I were ill she would not
nurse me through any imaginable contagion,

351

BEYOND LIFE

nor that if she were drowning I would not
plunge in after her, whatever my delinquencies
at swimming: what I mean is that, pending
such high crises, we tolerate each other amic-
ably, and never think of doing more. • • And
from our blood-kin we grow apart inevitably.
Their lives and their interests are no longer
the same as ours, and when we meet it is with
conscious reservations and much manufactured
talk. Besides, they know things about us which
we resent . . And with the rest of my fellows,
I find that convention orders all our dealings,
even with children, and we do and say what
seems more or less expected. And I know that
we distrust one another all the while, and in-
stinctively conceal or misrepresent our actual
thoughts and emotions when there is no very
apparent need. . • Personally, I do not like
human beings because I am not aware, upon
the whole, of any generally distributed qualities
which entitle them as a race to admiration and
affection. But toward people in books — such
as Mrs. Millamant, and Helen of Troy, and
Bella Wilfer, and Melusine, and Beatrix Es-
mond, — ^I may intelligently overflow with ten-
derness and caressing words, in part because
they deserve it, and in part because I know they

352

WE AWAIT

will not Buspeot me of being ** queer'' or of
having nlterior motives. . •

And I very often wish that I could know the
truth about just any one circumstance con-
nected with my life. • • Is the phantasmagoria
of sound and noise and color really passing or
is it all an illusion here in my brain t How do
you know that you are not dreaming me^ for
instance f In your conceded dreams, I am sure,
you must invent and see and listen to persons
who for the while seem quite as real to you as
I do now. As I do, you observe, I sayl and
what thing is it to which I so glibly refer as
If If you will try to form a notion of yourself,
of the sort of a something that you suspect to
inhabit and partially to control your flesh and
blood body, you will encounter a walking bundle
of superfluities: and when you mentally have
put aside the extraneous things, — ^your gar-
ments and your members and your body, and
your acquired habits and your appetites and
your inherited traits and your prejudices, and
all other appurtenances which considered sepa-
rately you recognize to be no integral part of
you,— tiiere seems to remain in those pearl-
colored brain-cells, wherein is your ultimate
lair, very little save a faculty for receiving

353

BEYOND LIFE

sensations, of which you know the larger por-
tion to be illusory. And surely, to be just a
very gullible consciousness provisionally exist-
ing among inexplicable mysteries, is not an en-
viable plight And yet this life — ^to which I
cling tenaciously, — comes to no more. Mean-
while I hear men talk about "the truth' '; and
they even wager handsome sums upon their
knowledge of it: but I align myself with "jest-
ing Pilate,'* and echo the forlorn query that
recorded time has left unanswered. • •

Then, last of all, I desiderate urbanity. I be-
lieve this is the rarest quality in the world.
Indeed, it probably does not exist anywhere.
A really urbane person — ^a mortal open-minded
and affable to conviction of his own shortcom-
ings and errors, and unguided in anything by
irrational blind prejudices, — could not but in a
world of men and women be regarded as a
monster. We are aU of us, as if by instinct, in-
tolerant of that which is unfamiliar: we resent
its impudence: and very much the same prin-
ciple which prompts small boys to jeer at a
straw-hat out of season induces their elders to
send missionaries to the heathen. The history
of the progress of the human race is but the
picaresque romance of intolerance, a narrative

354

WE AWAIT

of how — ^what is it Milton saysf — ** truth never
came into the world bnt, like a bastard, to the
ignominy of him that brought her f orth, till
time hath washed and salted the infant, declared
her legitimate, and churched the father of his
young Minerva.*' And I, who prattle to you,
very candidly confess that I have no patience
with other people's ideas unless they coincide
with mine: for if the fellow be demonstrably
wrong I am fretted by his stupidity, and if his
notion seem more nearly right than mine 1 am
infuriated . . Yet I wish I could acquire ur-
banity, very much as I would like to have wings.
For in default of it, I cannot even manage to be
civil to that piteous thing called human nature,
or to view its parasites, whether they be poli-
ticians or clergymen or popular authors, with
one half the commiseration which the shifts
they are put to, quite certainly, would rouse in
the urbane. . •

So I in point of fact desire of literature, just
as you guessed, precisely those things of which
I most poignantly and most constantly feel the
lack in my own life. And it is that which ro-
mance affords her postulants. The philtres of

355

BEYOND LIFE

romance are brewed to free us from this nn-
satisfying life that is calendared by fiscal years,
and to contrive a less disastrous elusion of our
own personalities than many seek dispersedly
in drink and drugs and lust and fanaticism, and
sometimes in death. For, beset by his own
rationality, the normal man is goaded to evade
the strictures of his normal life, upon the in-
contestable ground that it is a stupid and un-
lovely routine ; and to escape likewise from his
own personality, which bores him quite as much
as it does his associates. So he hurtles into
these very various roads from reality, precisely
as a goaded sheep flees without notice of what
lies ahead. . .

And romance tricks him, but not to his harm.
For, be it remembered that man alone of ani-
mals plays the ape to his dreams. Romance it
is undoubtedly who whispers to every man that
life is not a blind and aimless business, not all
a hopeless waste and confusion; and that his
existence is a pageant (appreciatively observed
by divine spectators), and that he is strong and
excellent and wise: and to romance he listens,
willing and thrice willing to be cheated by the
honeyed fiction. The things of which romance
assures him are very far from true: yet it is

356

WE AWAIT

solely by believing himself a creature bnt little
lower than the cherubim that man has by in-
terminable small degrees become, upon the
whole, distinctly superior to the chimpanzee:
so that, however extravagant may seem these
flattering whispers to-day, they were immeas-
ureably more remote from veracity when men
first began to listen to their sugared susurrus,
and steadily the discrepancy lessens. To-day
these things seem quite as preposterous to calm
consideration as did flying yesterday: and so,
to the OradgrindianSy romance appears to dis-
course foolishly, and incurs the common fate
of prophets: for it is about to-morrow and
about the day after to-morrow, that romance is
talking, by means of parables. And all the
while man plays the ape to fairer and yet fairer
dreams, and practise strengthens him at
mimickry. . •

To what does the whole business tend?— why,
how in heaven's name should I know? We can
but be content to note that all goes forward^
toward something. . . It may be that we are
nocturnal creatures perturbed by rumors of a
dawn which comes inevitably, as prologue to

867

BEYOND LIFE

a day wherein we and our children have no part
whatever. It may be that when onr arboreal
propositus descended from his pahn-tree and
began to walk upright about the earth, hia
progeny were forthwith committed to a journey
in which to-day is only a way-station. Yet I
prefer to take it that we are components of an
unfinished world, and that we are but as seeth-
ing atoms which ferment toward its making, if
merely because man as he now exists can hardly
be the finished product of any Creator whom
one could very heartily revere. We are being
made into something quite unpredictable, I im-
agine : and through the purging and the smelt-
ing, we are sustained by an instinctive knowl-
edge that we are being made into something
better. For this we know, quite incommu-
nicably, and yet as surely as we know that we
wUl to have it thus.

And it is this will that stirs in us to have
the creatures of earth and the affairs of earth,
not as they are, but '*as they ought to be,''
which we call romance. But when we note how
visibly it sways all life we perceive that we are
talking about Ood

XZFIJOIT T7LTBA VUAK

358

SOME OTHER BOOKS BY MR. CABELL

(With Tributes of the Press)

Mr. Oabell'B sl^le of writing bristles with the maadlin and
lachrymose romantics such as fascinate the shop-girls in ttte
pages of George Barr McCutcheon. And then too has Mr.
Cabell's ironjr a way of losing itself in the burbles of profound
and academic inanities. Also he is lacking in the courage of
his disillusion^ and . . . because of this lack of courage does
his irony become a sort of meandering wistf ulness like the whine
of a little old man suffering from false teeth. Finally Mr.
Cabell is lacking as a x>oet He is unable to create those illu-
sions so necessary for the reality of fiction. ... 80 Cabell
remains the sardonic professor mouthing in the boring rhetorio
of the classroom.— Bin Hscht, in The Chicago News.

359

THE CREAM OP T HH JEST
(A Comedy of SvaHom)

Mr. CSabeO ia a self -^onseiona sentimMitaliflt, hopelefldj m<.
In this book he goes farther in speeolative and vagoe imagin-
ings than he ha« ever ventored bef ore, with the result that he
has developed to an amaiing extent a porposeleBs fanta^. Mr.
Oahell is goilty abo of a eorions inteUeetnal egotism. He thna
assumes on the part of the reader a neeessary interest and ^7m-
pathj, perhaps eren admiration, that are hardly Juatiiled hj the
book itself. The result is a mystery without interest^ a fanciful
eonstruetion of character and experience that does not stir the
f an^.— ^eip Orleam PMaywie.

The author fails of making his dull characters humanely
pitiable^ But it ia material for a short story, not for a noveL
A single slight situatton, and a group of persons whp do not
act as or change from the first page to the last are not heavy
enough to weight a volume.— UTew York Poit.

A rambling story, without form, and told in a blundering
disorderly fashion. The work is uneven, . . . with
of gray dullness.— ^0W Torh Tribune.

360

THE BIVET IN GBANDFATHEB'8 NECK
(A Comedy of Limitations)

A eoiiTentional Southern story. . . . There is no new die-
eemmenty no stmmlating aocial eriticum. Mr. Cabell may think
that he haa diseoTered . • . theee things, and recently, but they
are no diseoTeries to the rest of the world. There is no under-
standing in this book of social currents of the past, much less of
the present. The story is . • . ahnost banal enough to become
a best seller.— Clxxxnt Wood, in The New York CoU.

Certainly the reading public of both North and South cannot
forgive Mr. Cabell for writing a story in which not one man or
woman is aboTe reproach, not one who is not besmirched by
scandal, not one who has any message of hopefulness to teach
us how to live nobly.— Bii#aIo News, New Tork.

The title is not the only queer thing about Mr. CabeDTi
novel, ... but the reviewer fails to &id it significant The
women are not the kind one likes to read about, and ... the
heroine is a good deal of a f ooL The scheme of the book ia
impossible, and • • . it is a mass of commonplaces, through
which is run a thread of the wildly improbable. . • . The book
is illogical in the extreme^ and ... it is not one that is likely
to be long discussed or remembered.— BrooX^Iifn Bogle, New
York.

A story of the Bobert W. Chambers sort ... If the book
is ^ical, there can be no regret that such people axe disi^
pearing.— /9pnnp/!e2d BepubUcan, Massachusetts.

361

THE CEBTAm HOUB

(DiBoin des Poet€$)

A eoneetion of "romantie'' tales about poeti dead and gona^
pref aeed by a f atoous easaj on literature. • . . Two poem^
far from poetie, are included in the hook.^^The Independent,
New York.

After indulging in a trite and tedious prologue, in wUeh lie
▼irtually goes over the ground we covered in college, on the aig-
nifieanee of American literature^ and giyes his reasons for be>
lieving ihere is nothing worth while in littf ature at this time^
the author offers some dozen short stories to prove his poin^»
stories of his own composition. . . . Does not create the proper
illusions. . . . The author is not true to the people and the
times with which he deals. . . . Beaders wiU prefer Mr.
Black's novel "Judith BhakespearOi" ... or, for pure enjoy-
ment, we might prefer "The Jessamj Bride.**— PhOoiislpMa
Press.

The tales might be successful if Mr. Oabeirs literaxy taale
were truei^— but he is one of the most jpretentioudy attitudinis-
ing of American authors.— London Timee, England.

362

THE 00BD8 OP VANITY

(A Comedy of SMrhing)

Aboat as poor stuff as one ean find in a book pat ont by
reputable publishers. . . . The whole thing is slushy and dis-
gusting.— Cleveland PZoifi Dealer, Ohio.

There is very litUe in the book either in manner or matter
to commend it. — Vtioa Observer, New York.

The frontispiece is about the only commendable feature of
**The Cords of Vanilgr."— ^etr TorJc World.

Why any author should waste his time in writing the me*
moirs of a heartless^ selfish, penniless and conceited libertine,
is more than most readers of this book will be able to under-
stand. . . . Pity it is that some more elevating subject might
not be chosen. — Portland Journal, Oregon.

We close the book with a disposition to ponder upon the
singular perversity of those who need a trespass-warning to
keep them from so sterile and malodorous a field. . . . Worse
than immoral — dulL . . . The narrative is cheap and sickly
... the effect is revolting. — New York Post.

Inconsequent and rambling, . . rather nauseating at times,
• ... a series of episodes of cold-blooded sordidness, . . a
very unpleasant theme, ... a most diBoreputable character for
hero. . . . We cannot go further than this in commendation of
the book. — ^A. L. Sxssions, in Ainslee's Magaeine.

363

THE 80T7L OF MEUGENT
(A Comedjf of Waman-WorMp)
The book is well bound, witii eolored illcuitntUma.— O^froil

There are four illiutratioiui in eolor bj Howard Pjrle.—
New§-Leader, Biehmond, Virginia.

The iUnstrations bj Howard Fyle are gems of his talent ae
a eolorist— PModelpMa Presi.

The book is attraetiyelj printed, with iHostrations bj How-
ard P7le.— Boifon QU>he.

The story is illnstrated with full-page pictures in color hj
Howard Tjl^'^Pittihwrgh Chronicle Telegraph.

The Pyle pictures are ezceedinglj spirited and edlorfoL—
Bro6kl}fn Standard VnUm, New York.

Will make a suitable Christmas present to a girl, and is
illustrated in color bj Howard Pjle.— Joseph M. QuxMnN, in
The Portland Oregoniian, Oregon.

364

CHIVALBT

(Msain det Beiaiei)

GALLANTBY

(IHvatn de$ Feie$ 0<denie$)

THE LINE OF LOVE
(Beptain dea Manages)

As to *KSi^Mlry,*' it reqaii«8 a nieer touch than Mr. Cabell's
to reprodnM the atmosphere of ti&e Middle Ages; Wardour
Street 1«> giif ^ is not enoagh. In these stories the artifiee is
more apparent than the art; it is the sort of playing at anti-
quity which only genius can make endurable. However, the book
eontains a number of illnstrations in color from paintings mostly
by Mr. Pyle. These are admirably doner-Providence Journal,
Bhode Island.

In ''Qallantiy^ the eharaeters, their costumes, manners,
ideas and actions have about the naturalness of a modem cos-
tume balL The author tries hard to maintain a stilted style,
but frequent^ loses patience with it and relieves himself with
the most modem of slang. Mr. Howard Pyle outdoes himself
in glaring color and meagre composition. — New TorJc Sun,

'The liine of Love^' is execrable and unf orgiveable. ; . . It
is as though a painter, picturing the fair face and^orm of
some youthful maiden, should with morbid insistence paint in
also the lungs that vivify her, the heart that sends her young
blood bounding, and the spreading nerves that tingle to her joy.
Such love for truth is an unworthy remnant of that dull and
ugly realism that at one time threatened to darken all our
literature. If Mr. Ckbell merely affects it, his fault is unfor-
givable. If his belief in this phase of art is geuuine, then we
can but hope for his early enUghtenment. . . . But one almost
forgets the text, for pleasure in Howard Pyle's odd and deep-
hued pietores.— Lea<2sr, Bichmond, Virginia.

365

THE EAGLFS SHADOW
(A Comedy of Pwrie-StringB)

Tells a moMHSOvered story. • • . Bach a paleosoie idea da>
manda novelty of treatment. . . . Cabell deals witii it in a
stodgy way, and tries to freshen it up by some absurd eariea-
tores.— Cleveland FUtiin Dealer, Ohio.

The novel is poorly writteiii and sho^is an bnmatority of
style hardly eiensaUe in print— ififprin^/Ield Sej^liean, Mas-
sachusetts.

The dialogue and bomptions style of the author overshadow
the story. . . . The reader is not allowed to devote nnqnali-
fled attention to anything but the insistent personality of the
author. If he is ever distracted therefrom it is only by the
inanities and vapid conversations of the dramatis personsB. —
MUvtaukee Wieeomin.

A more painf ulfy jocose book can hardly be imagined. . . •
The satire is crude and clumpy. The book is journeyman's
work thronghottty and it does not deserve the space taken for
saying so.— Providence /oumoZ, Ehode Island.

A boudoir budget of romantic absurdities. • • • But witii
time and experience^ aided by the sympathetic appreciation of
the reviewer, Mr. Cabell will doubtless learn.— ^sio Torh Sun.

366

*^TfJf

*J> i

ED AT NRLF

THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ

This book is due on the losl DATI stamped below.

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